Liquid crystal film rupture

Work by Trung Dac Nguyen, Jan-Michael Carrillo, and Mike Brown at ORNL to model liquid crystal thin films and investigate their stability. These were large-scale simulations of up to 26 million ellipsoidal particles, each representing a liquid-crystal mesogen, run using the GPU-accelerated Gay-Berne potential developed by Mike Brown, on the Titan machine at ORNL.

The images show a hole formed in a nematic film (mesogens colored by their distance to the substrate), a top view of such a hole (mesogens colored by their alignment with their neighbors), and surface undulations where pink corresponds to thick regions and green to thinner regions.