The tools of surface science have enabled a thorough understanding of the ordering of
liquid crystalline materials in contact with the surfaces of solids. This report moves beyond …

Liquid crystals allow us to perform experiments that provide insight into fundamental
problems of modern physics, such as phase transitions, frustration, elasticity …

As their name indicates, liquid crystals simultaneously exhibit some characteristics common
to both ordinary isotropic liquids and solid crystals. This ambivalence is also found in the …

This paper aims to provide an introduction to a basic form of the ${\bf Q} $-tensor approach
to modelling liquid crystals, which has seen increased interest in recent years. The increase …

Despite the large quantity of phenomenological information concerning the bulk properties
of nematic phase liquid crystals, little is understood about the origin of the surface energy …

This book was written to enable physicists and engineers to learn, within a single course,
some topics in variational calculus, theory of elasticity, molecular models, and surface …

Using angular momentum representation a method is proposed that allows the systematic
construction of a generalized Landau-de Gennes elastic free energy of liquid crystals, in …

We present a formulation of the nematic liquid crystal hydrodynamics based on the tensor
order parameter, with the spatial variations of both the director and the scalar (uniaxial and …

This paper develops the equilibrium equations describing the flexoelectric effect in soft
dielectrics under large deformations. Previous works have developed related theories using …

Using optical second-harmonic generation as a probe, we have observed polar ordering of
4′− n− octyl− 4− cyanobiphenyl (8CB) molecules in a monolayer at an 8CB-glass interface …