Lamellar Fluctuations Melt Ferroelectricity

Topological defects in lamellar phases: passages, and their fluctuations

In lamellar phases of ternary amphiphilic mixtures~ passages are tube-like connections of neighboring oil(or water-) layers. Passages form spontaneously due to the thermal fluctuations of the monolayers (or membranes), which separate oil and water. Analogous membrane conformations also exist in binary amphiphilic mixtures~ where the membranes are amphiphilic bilayers. We study the shape and the...

Fluctuations and defects in lamellar stacks of amphiphilic bilayers

We review recent molecular dynamics simulations of thermally activated undulations and defects in the lamellar Lα phase of a binary amphiphile-solvent mixture, using an idealized molecular coarse-grained model: Solvent particles are represented by beads, and amphiphiles by bead-and-spring tetramers. We find that our results are in excellent agreement with the predictions of simple mesoscopic th...

Use of an Autologous Lamellar Scleral Graft to Repair a Scleral Melt After Mitomycin Application

Mitomycin (MMC) has been associated with a variety of complications, including corneoscleral melt. We report the successful repair of a scleral melt with a partial thickness autologous scleral graft of the scleral melting. A 55-year-old male patient underwent pterygium resection surgery and intraoperative MMC application. The patient developed a deep melting area that almost reached the choroid...

Nucleation of stable cylinders from a metastable lamellar phase in a diblock copolymer melt

The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the mean-field Landau–Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet interfacial profile, an analytic expression for the interfacial free energy of an interface of arbitrary orientation between cylinders and la...

Ferroelectricity at molecular level