This summer, SoftMatterTheory members Tim, Zhaoyu and I visited Patrick Spicer’s lab at University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia for about 10 days. This trip was made possible by the Sandler International Research Grant from Tufts.
Patrick leads the complex fluids group at UNSW. They work with fluids with unique responses, […]
We’re delighted to announce the publication of a new paper in collaboration with Applied Mathematicians at Tufts, Oxford and Memorial University of Newfoundland. This paper considers the intriguing problem of cholesteric liquid crystals (that naturally form helical structures) in cylinders of elliptical cross section. The results illustrate a mathematical technique, referred to as deflation, that […]
I‘m delighted to announce that our new paper, “Predicting the influence of plate geometry on the eddy-current pendulum” has just been published in the American Journal of Physics. This journal publishes material related to physics education and our paper concerns a familiar classroom demonstration called Van Waltenhofen’s pendulum (or the Eddy Current pendulum) […]
Andrew DeBenedictis and Tim Atherton have just published a paper on “Shape minimisation problems in liquid crystals” in a special 30th anniversary issue of Liquid Crystals. Wanting to present a forward-looking picture, the journal’s editor reached out to young experts across the field, including professor Atherton, to present their latest exciting work. As […]
Graduate student Andrew DeBenedictis has just published his paper “Competition of lattice and basis for alignment of nematic liquid crystals” in Physical Review E. Featuring other coauthors Candy Anquetil-Deck, Doug Cleaver, David Emerson, Mathew Wolak, James Adler, and Tim Atherton, the paper represents a collaboration among physicists and mathematicians here at Tufts and at Sheffield […]
Grad student Chris Burke has just published his paper “The role of curvature anisotropy in the ordering of spheres on an ellipsoid” in the journal Soft Matter along with co-authors Badel Mbanga, Zengyi Wei, Patrick Spicer, and Tim Atherton. This paper focuses on geometric frustration: spheres tend to form orderly hexagonal packings, but they can’t do this on a curved surface, so there must be defects […]
In this paper, we study the evolution of defects on a deforming, curved interface endowed with liquid crystalline order.
Two nematic shells brought in contact coalesce in order to reduce their interfacial tension. We study the defect textures as the combined shell shape evolves. Using large scale computer simulations, we resolve the director field […]
We’re delighted to announce that our new paper, published in collaboration with Cristian Staii’s lab is now available online at Physical Review E. We’re particularly excited to congratulate undergraduate researchers Dan Rizzo (the first author!) and Matt Wiens on their first peer reviewed paper—well done!
On the left, a figure from the paper shows […]
We’re pleased to announce our new paper has just been published in Physical Review E. This paper was also previously made available as a preprint on the ArXiV.
The paper combines simulations, experiments and theory to understand how a patterned surface can be used to control the alignment of a nematic liquid crystal. […]
Chris Burke celebrates his first journal article published today in the Journal of the Optical Society of America B. The preprint version of the article is also to be found on the ArXiV.
This work was part of a collaborative project with Rolfe Petschek and Joe Lesnefsky at Case Western Reserve University.
Questions/Feedback
Email us at timothy.atherton@tufts.edu