When subjected to magnetic or electric fields, nematic liquid crystals confined between two parallel glass plates and initially uniformly oriented may undergo homogeneous one-dimensional spatial distortions (Fréedericksz and Zolina, Trans. Faraday Soc. 29:919, 1933) or periodic distortions (Lonberg and Meyer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 55(7):718–721, 1985; and Srajer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 67(9):1102–1...

We report theoretical and numerical evaluations of the phase diagram for patchy colloidal particles of new generation. We show that the reduction of the number of bonded nearest neighbors offers the possibility of generating liquid states (i.e., states with temperature T lower than the liquid-gas critical temperature) with a vanishing occupied packing fraction (phi), a case which can not be rea...

This work investigates heat transfer and phase change during picosecond laser ablation of nickel. In this study, ablation of nickel is studied using a mode-locked 25 ps (FWHM) Nd:YAG laser. The threshold fluence for mass removal (ablation) is experimentally determined. Numerical calculations of the transient temperature distribution and kinetics of the solid–liquid and liquid–vapor phase change...

X-ray and neutron scattering techniques are probably the most effective tools to be employed in order to determine the structure of liquid interfaces on molecular length scales. These are not different in principle from conventional X-ray diffraction techniques that are usually applied to three dimensional crystals, liquids, solid surfaces etc. However, special diffractometers that enable scatt...

The combination of scCO2 with a non-volatile liquid such as ionic liquids, water, or poly(ethylene glycol) creates a biphasic mixture suitable for homogeneous catalysis with facile catalyst/product separation and catalyst recycling. Continuous-flow processes are also possible. Dissolution of the CO2 into the nonvolatile liquid during the reaction can have desirable or undesirable effects on the...

The objective of this work was to introduce a novel method for refining the solidification microstructure. Traditional casting usually solidifies one homogeneous liquid by removing heat from liquid surface, by which the microstructure solely depends on the heat removal rate for the given alloy composition. The newly developed multi-liquid composite simultaneous casting concept raises an alterna...

[1] Despite its atmospheric importance, homogeneous freezing of aqueous drops is poorly understood. Here we provide evidence that at atmospheric pressures the conditions leading to the initiation of freezing in pure water are those for which the liquid compressibility and the corresponding density fluctuations reach maxima. This liquid-only criterion for the onset of freezing contrasts with the...

The Unitary Correlation Operator Method (UCOM) is employed to treat short-range correlations in both, homogeneous liquid and small droplets of bosonic 4 He atoms. The dominating short-range correlations in these systems are described by an unitary transformation in the two-body relative coordinate, applied either to the many-body state or to the Hamiltonian and other operators. It is shown that...

The optical properties of cholesteric and chiral smectic liquid crystals are studied, in the limit of pitch smaller than the wavelength of visible light, by means of a formalism borrowing techniques developed to explain form birefringence effects in particulate media. The behaviour of actual stratified anisotropic substances is shown to be accurately approximated, in this limit, by an effective...

Liquid crystals are often combined with polymers to influence the liquid crystals' orientation and mechanical properties, but at the expense of reorientation speed or uniformity of alignment. We introduce a new method to create self-assembled nematic liquid-crystal gels using an ABA triblock copolymer with a side-group liquid-crystalline midblock and liquid-crystal-phobic endblocks. In contrast...