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Liquid crystals are substances that flow like a liquid but maintain some of the ordered structure of crystals. Liquid-crystal molecules tend to be elongated and to orient in specific directions.
Assembly of block copolymers can be controlled to give varying morphologies and functionalities, but there are still aspects of the process that are not well understood. Here, the authors report convoluted self-assembly behaviours of block copolymers with discotic liquid crystalline moieties.
Metalenses are lightweight and compact alternative to achromatic lens assemblies, but they usually fulfill the focusing requirements for a single wavelength. The authors design and fabricate a cascade liquid crystal Pancharatnam-Berry lens that enables a seven-wavelength achromatic focusing in a broad range of frequencies.
Wang and colleagues design a flowmeter composed of a liquid crystal-filled nested capillary which demonstrates thermal stability and high sensitivity. The device measures air flow via its cooling effect resulting in a measurable spectrum shift in whispering gallery modes.
Exploring and exploiting electric dipole arrangements analogously to what is possible with magnetic spin textures is an emerging prospect. Now a spontaneous toroidal polar topology is observed in ferroelectric liquid crystals.
Studies of a biological active nematic fluid reveal a spontaneous self-constraint that arises between self-motile topological defects and mesoscale coherent flow structures. The defects follow specific contours of the flow field, on which vorticity and strain rate balance, and hence, contrary to expectation, they break mirror symmetry.
The liquid-crystal-like order of cells in epithelial tissues aids rearrangements, but there is disagreement over the dominant liquid crystal phase. Now, a unified approach reveals that two distinct symmetries dominate at different scales.
The guiding of magnetic fields by soft ferromagnetic solids is well known and exploited in magnetic shielding applications. Now, ferroelectric nematic liquids are shown to analogously guide electric fields.
Liquid crystal defect structures with topology similar to a Möbius strip can rotate, translate and transform into one another under an applied electric field.
