Activities
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Seminars
| Seminar on Theoretical and Computational Physics:
| | Title | Soft vesicles with orientational order
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| Speaker | Nguyen Thanh Son
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| Affiliation | Kent State University, USA
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| Date | Tuesday, 17-09-2013
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| Time | 10:00 AM
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| Location | Meeting room, first floor, Institute of physics, 10 Dao Tan, Ba Dinh, Hanoi
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| Abstract | Nematic liquid crystal (NLC) is a special phase of matter in which the molecules have random positions and tend to align parallel to each other. When NLC is confined on a closed vesicle, there must be a total topological charge of +2, which normally occurs as four defects of charge +1/2 each. Previous research has suggested that these four defects will form a regular tetrahedron, leading to a tetrahedral shape of the vesicle, which may be useful in designing colloidal particles for photonic applications. Here, we use three approaches to investigate the behavior of a nematic vesicle: particle-based simulation, spherical harmonic expansion, and nite-element modeling. We found that the perfect tetrahedral shape is only stable when the vesicle is completely rigid; the vesicle is a distorted tetrahedron for a hard membrane and a highly elongated rectangle for a softer membrane.
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