We investigate the statistical mechanics of chirality and biaxiality in liquid crystals through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Monte Carlo simulations, lattice mean-field theory, and Landau theory. All of these calculations show that there is an important interaction between cholesteric twist and biaxial order: The twist acts as a field on the biaxial order, and conversely, the ...

Variational cluster calculations and Monte Carlo simulations are applied to hard-body board-like models of biaxial molecules forming liquid crystalline phases. The molecular long axes are assumed for simplicity to be fully oriented. Depending on the extent of transverse anisometry in the molecular shape, these systems can exhibit biaxial nematic phases as well as uniaxial and biaxial orthogonal...

the three-phase-lag model and green–naghdi theory without energy dissipation are employed to study the deformation of a two-temperature fiber-reinforced medium with an internal heat source that is moving with a constant speed under a hydrostatic initial stress and the gravity field.  the modulus of the elasticity is given as a linear function of the reference temperature. the exact expressions ...

The possible symmetries of the biaxial nematic phase are examined against the implications of the presently available experimental results. Contrary to the widespread notion that biaxial nematics have orthorhombic symmetry, our study shows that a monoclinic (C(2h)) symmetry is more likely to be the case for the recently observed phase biaxiality in thermotropic bent-core and calamitic-tetrapode...

We examine the phase behaviour of colloidal suspensions of hard board-like particles (HBPs) as a function of their shape anisotropy, and observe a fascinating spectrum of nematic, smectic, and columnar liquid-crystalline phases, whose formation is entirely driven by excluded volume effects. We map out the phase diagram of short and long HBPs by gradually modifying their shape from prolate to ob...

This paper describes the dynamics of capillary self-alignment of components with initial shift offsets from matching receptor sites. The analysis of the full uniaxial self-alignment dynamics of foil-based mesoscopic dies from pre-alignment to final settling evidenced three distinct, sequential regimes impacting the process performance. The dependence of accuracy, alignment time and repeatabilit...

BACKGROUND Dilation and dissection of aneurysmal ascending aortic tissues occur preferentially at the outer curvature of the vessel. In this study we hypothesize that the density and contractile properties of the vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) of the pig ascending aorta (AA) are heterogeneous and could explain the non-uniform remodeling and weakening of the AA during aneurysm formation. ...

Thermomechanical properties of monolayer graphene with thermal fluctuation are studied by both statistical mechanics analysis and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. While the statistical mechanics analysis in the present study is limited by a harmonic approximation, significant anharmonic effects are revealed by MD simulations. The amplitude of out-ofplane thermal fluctuation is calculated fo...

We present a systematic study of strain effects on the electronic band structure of the group-IIInitrides (AlN, GaN and InN). The calculations are based on density functional theory (DFT) with band-gap-corrected approaches including hybrid functional and quasiparticle G0W0 methods. We study strain effects under realistic strain conditions, hydrostatic pressure and biaxial stress. The strain-ind...