Laboratory of Physics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Tržaška Cesta 25, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, 01-224, Warsaw, Poland.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jul 1;13(1):10663. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-37664-2.
The impact of the intrinsic curvature of in-plane orientationally ordered curved flexible nematic molecules attached to closed 3D flexible shells was studied numerically. A Helfrich-Landau-de Gennes-type mesoscopic approach was adopted where the flexible shell's curvature field and in-plane nematic field are coupled and concomitantly determined in the process of free energy minimisation. We demonstrate that this coupling has the potential to generate a rich diversity of qualitatively new shapes of closed 3D nematic shells and the corresponding specific in-plane orientational ordering textures, which strongly depend on the shell's volume-to-surface area ratio, so far not predicted in mesoscopic-type numerical studies of 3D shapes of closed flexible nematic shells.
我们对附着于闭合 3D 柔性壳的面内各向有序弯曲柔性向列分子的固有曲率的影响进行了数值研究。采用了 Helfrich-Landau-de Gennes 型介观方法，其中柔性壳的曲率场和面内向列场在自由能最小化过程中相互耦合并同时确定。我们证明，这种耦合有可能产生多种多样全新的闭合 3D 向列壳形状和相应的特定面内取向有序纹理，这些形状和纹理强烈依赖于壳的体积-表面积比，这在闭合柔性向列壳的 3D 形状的介观型数值研究中迄今尚未预测到。
