Flexoelectricity is an electromechanical coupling between the electric field and mechanical strain gradient, as well strains observed in all dielectric materials, including those with centrosymmetry. demands C1-continuity for straightforward numerical implementation governing equations gradient theory are fourth-order partial differential equations. In this work, alternative collocation-based m...

The formation of flexoelectric stripe patterns (flexodomains) was studied under the influence of external electric and magnetic fields in a nematic liquid crystal. The critical voltage and wavevector of flexodomains were investigated in different geometries by both experiments and simulations. It is demonstrated that upon altering the orientation of the magnetic field with respect to the direct...

We describe a new nematic liquid-crystal colloid system which is characterized by both charge stabilization of the particles and an interaction force. We estimate the effective charge of the particles by electrophoretic measurements and find that in such systems the director anchoring energy W is very low and the particles have little director distortion around them. The interaction force is cr...

2014 The hydrodynamic equations describing the macroscopic behaviour of chiral smectic C are presented. To derive these equations the nature of the spontaneously broken continuous symmetries is considered and their consequences for the hydrodynamics are pointed out. Similarities and differences to achiral smectic C and cholesteric liquid crystals are investigated in some detail. The influence a...

We demonstrate that the frozen-ion contribution to the flexoelectric coefficient is given solely in terms of the sum of third moments of the charge-density distortions induced by atomic displacements, even for ferroelectric or piezoelectric materials. We introduce several practical supercell-based methods for calculating these coefficients from first principles, and demonstrate them by computin...