2014/12/31 by Danilo B. Liarte, Matthew Bierbaum, Muxin Zhang +4
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Computer Science · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Artificial intelligence #Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques #Computer science #Conic section #Ellipse #Geometry #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Liquid crystal #Materials science #Mathematics #Optics #Physics #Plant and animal studies #Statistical physics #Visualization #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.92.062511
published as Phys. Rev. E 92, 062511 (2015) · 10 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2015/12/01 · openalex publication_date 2015/12/21 · arxiv updated 2015/12/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we develop and numerically implement an effective theory to study the dynamics of focal conic domains in smectic-A liquid crystals. We use the information about the smectic's structure and energy density provided by our simulations to develop several novel visualization tools for the focal conics. Our simulations accurately describe both simple and extensional shear, which we compare to experiments, and provide additional insight into the coarsening dynamics of focal conic domains.