Liquid crystals articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When particle-laden drops evaporate, coffee ring patterns form which can affect particle deposition. Here Davidsonet al. show that unlike previously investigated drops, the flows in drying drops of liquid crystals are driven by an increase in surface tension due to liquid crystal concentration.

    • Zoey S. Davidson
    • , Yongyang Huang
    •  & A. G. Yodh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Stimuli-responsive materials are commonly used in autonomous systems, whilst it is challenging to power them in a programmable manner. Here, Waniet al. use an optical fibre to control the shape of light-responsive liquid-crystal elastomers, which allow the device to detect and trap targeted objects.

    • Owies M. Wani
    • , Hao Zeng
    •  & Arri Priimagi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tuning of plasmonic nanostructures has yet to cover a full colour basis set with a single nanostructure. Franklinet al. demonstrate a liquid crystal-plasmonic system that covers the full red-green-blue colour basis set as a function of voltage and which can be actively addressed with thin-film-transistor technology.

    • Daniel Franklin
    • , Russell Frank
    •  & Debashis Chanda

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Liquid crystal mixtures are used in commercial applications and their composition affects their properties. Here Rahimiet al. use atomistic simulations to show that defects influence the molecular arrangement of the mixture components leading to a deviation of the local order from that of the bulk.

    • Mohammad Rahimi
    • , Hadi Ramezani-Dakhel
    •  & Juan J. de Pablo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Topological defects play important roles in determining material properties, whilst their core regions remain unexplored due to strongly distorted structures. Zhouet al. take advantage of extended core regions in a chromonic liquid crystal and show both a radial and azimuthal dependent director and scalar order parameter.

    • Shuang Zhou
    • , Sergij V. Shiyanovskii
    •  & Oleg D. Lavrentovich

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Once a purely mathematical discipline, topology has become an essential tool to investigate physical phenomena such as topological states in liquid crystals. Posnjaket al. observe the existence of 3D point defects of higher than unit topological charge in thermally quenched chiral nematic droplets.

    • Gregor Posnjak
    • , Simon Čopar
    •  & Igor Muševič

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nematic liquid crystals are frequently used as a reconfigurable material to control light propagation and as a nonlinear medium supporting solitons. Here, the authors demonstrate steering of such solitons in bulk nematic liquid crystals without lateral anchoring by external magnetic fields.

    • Yana Izdebskaya
    • , Vladlen Shvedov
    •  & Wieslaw Krolikowski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Topological defects in nematic liquid crystals can be controlled upon external stimuli for designing novel photonic materials. Here, Hashemiet al. show geometry-induced formation of fractal defects in nematic fluids with the fractal self-similarity more than 90% from micrometers to nanometres.

    • S. M. Hashemi
    • , U. Jagodič
    •  & M. Ravnik

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The demand for soft robots urges the development of new light-responsive materials for remotely powered actuation. Here, Wie et al. show directional motion over centimeter scales using azobenzene-functionalized liquid crystalline polymer films upon continuous radiation from ultraviolet to visible light.

    • Jeong Jae Wie
    • , M. Ravi Shankar
    •  & Timothy J. White

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nematic liquid crystals have potential as sensors for various molecules. Here, the authors present a computational chemistry model for describing the detection of a warfare agent by liquid crystals, opening the door for the atomic-scale design of sensitive and selective chemoresponsive systems.

    • Luke T. Roling
    • , Jessica Scaranto
    •  & Manos Mavrikakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Photon upconversion can be used to harvest low energy photons, which are otherwise lost in solar cells. Here, Börjesson et al. use a well-oriented liquid crystal matrix to host the upconversion system in order to emit upconverted photons in a preferential direction, where the solar cells would be located.

    • K. Börjesson
    • , P. Rudquist
    •  & K. Moth-Poulsen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Confinement-induced organization of nanoparticles is utilized to generate new structures with novel optical or magnetic properties. Here, Li et al.show that colloidal liquid crystals formed by rod-like nanoparticles self-assemble into various geometries depending on the degree of spherical confinement in droplets.

    • Yunfeng Li
    • , Jeffrey Jun-Yan Suen
    •  & Eugenia Kumacheva

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Liquids near a solid surface form an interfacial layer where the molecular structure is different from the bulk. Here the authors report atomic resolution three-dimensional images of electrolyte solutions that demonstrate the existence of three types of interfacial structures as a function of concentration.

    • Daniel Martin-Jimenez
    • , Enrique Chacon
    •  & Ricardo Garcia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Liquid crystals are used in many applications, such as removable adhesives, but this requires both good bonding strength, and its rapid disappearance under an external stimulus. Here, Saito and others report a dynamic liquid crystal material that loses is bonding strength under photo irradiation.

    • Shohei Saito
    • , Shunpei Nobusue
    •  & Shigehiro Yamaguchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Liquid crystals that consist of rod-like molecules currently dominate the materials used in industry for display and photonic applications. Here, the authors demonstrate electro-optic grey-scale switching based on the spontaneous formation of a short-pitch helix in a tilted smectic phase of achiral bent-core molecules.

    • Sithara P. Sreenilayam
    • , Yuri P. Panarin
    •  & Carsten Tschierske

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrochromism, the dependence of light absorption upon electronic control, finds a wide range of applications in smart materials. Here, Liu et al. show an electrochromic DNA–surfactant liquid crystal system that exhibits electrically tunable optical absorption and thermally tunable memory.

    • Kai Liu
    • , Justin Varghese
    •  & Andreas Herrmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The entropy-driven formation of cholesteric liquid crystal, one of the widely used liquid crystal phase, has not yet been addressed in simulations due to large unit cells. Here, Dussi and Dijkstra overcome this problem by introducing a hard-particle model and show that shape alone can stabilize a chiral nematic phase.

    • Simone Dussi
    •  & Marjolein Dijkstra

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Membranes made from graphene have ultra-fast water transport and precise molecular sieving properties. Here, the authors show how large-area membranes can be manufactured by a rapid and scalable process based on shear alignment of graphene-oxide liquid crystals for unlocking industrial applications.

    • Abozar Akbari
    • , Phillip Sheath
    •  & Mainak Majumder

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ferromagnetism has been known as a material property of solids since the time of the ancient Greeks. Here, Shuai et al. report that magnetic nanoplates suspended in a simple solvent can spontaneously align to form a ferromagnetic liquid, capable of both producing and sensing magnetic fields.

    • M. Shuai
    • , A. Klittnick
    •  & N. A. Clark

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is commonly believed that graphene flakes form electrical percolation networks at low concentration, and thus can be used as conductive materials. Here, Yuan et al. show in graphene polymer composites that the transition to liquid crystals hinders the formation of percolated networks, resulting in high-kmaterials.

    • Jinkai Yuan
    • , Alan Luna
    •  & Philippe Poulin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Zeolites with regular porous structures are widely used as gas adsorbents and scaffolding for catalysts. Poppe et al. report a liquid crystal with zeolite-like structure by self-assembly of polyphilic molecules with π-conjugated rod-like cores into a honeycomb formed by pentagonal/octagonal channels.

    • Silvio Poppe
    • , Anne Lehmann
    •  & Carsten Tschierske

  • Article |

    Helical nanofilaments—composed of achiral, bent core molecules—have been shown to assemble into left- and right-handed structures. Here, the authors show diastereomeric interactions on the mesocale between chiral liquid crystal guest compounds and helical nanofilament-based pores.

    • Dong Chen
    • , Michael R. Tuchband
    •  & Noel A. Clark

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nematic and isotropic liquid phases can coexist within a narrow temperature window. Here, Kim et al. show how to control this mixed phase via thermal and dielectrophoretic manipulations, based on which nematic microfilaments in an isotropic medium, or vice versa, are demonstrated.

    • Soo-Dong Kim
    • , Bomi Lee
    •  & Jang-Kun Song

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Controlling the topology of matter offers an alternative way to make functional materials, among which liquid crystals hold promise due to their spontaneously occurring defects. Here Orlova et al. demonstrate the formation and remote control of topological structures in frustrated cholesteric droplets.

    • Tetiana Orlova
    • , Sarah Jane Aßhoff
    •  & Etienne Brasselet

  • Article |

    Existing lithographic methods for the micropatterning of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) are limited by mask production. Here, the authors fabricate fully 3D rGO microstructures in an aqueous nematic liquid crystal of two-dimensional GO flakes via a scalable, mask-free pulsed near-infrared laser approach.

    • Bohdan Senyuk
    • , Natnael Behabtu
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Polycrystalline thin films of small molecules hold promise for organic thin-film transistors because of their large charge mobility, but are currently limited by poor film homogeneity and thermal durability. Here, Iino et al. design an ordered liquid crystal phase to overcome these two problems.

    • Hiroaki Iino
    • , Takayuki Usui
    •  & Jun-ichi Hanna

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is a trade-off between increasing thickness of active layers in organic photovoltaic cells to be compatible with modern printing techniques and decreasing it to improve the device performance. Sun et al.report a nematic liquid crystalline molecular electron donor material used in thick layers.

    • Kuan Sun
    • , Zeyun Xiao
    •  & David J. Jones

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chiral determination of vapours is possible in biological systems as an important part of the olfactory system. Here, the authors describe a system that is capable of visually detecting and distinguishing the chirality of vapour-phase molecules by structural changes in a liquid crystal confined in open microchannels.

    • Takuya Ohzono
    • , Takahiro Yamamoto
    •  & Jun-ichi Fukuda

  • Article |

    Determining graphene domain size and distribution is important for realizing functional electronic devices. Here, the authors use liquid crystals to study graphene surfaces, via the liquid crystal molecules aligning with the domains, and use nematic to smectic transitions to study defects.

    • Jong-Ho Son
    • , Seung-Jae Baeck
    •  & Jong-Hyun Ahn

  • Article |

    Banana-shaped liquid crystals attract people’s attention nowadays because of their peculiar optical properties associated with a helical nanofilament phase. Here Zhang et al. report a doubly twisted packing of this phase, which is different from the parallel packing observed in the past.

    • C. Zhang
    • , N. Diorio
    •  & A Jákli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Molecular alignment in liquid crystals is conventionally achieved by surface mediation from the substrate side. Fukuhara et al.develop a method to photocontrol the orientation of liquid crystalline polymer films from the air side, which is guided by a photoresponsive skin layer.

    • Kei Fukuhara
    • , Shusaku Nagano
    •  & Takahiro Seki

  • Article |

    The ability to easily modulate a material’s photoluminescent properties in response to stimuli is difficult to achieve in liquid crystals. Here the authors report ionic liquid crystals exhibiting high fluorescent quantum yields with redox-dependent photoluminescence.

    • Amerigo Beneduci
    • , Sante Cospito
    •  & Giuseppe Chidichimo

  • Article |

    Knotted structures can be stabilized in nematic liquid crystals using colloidal particles. Here the authors demonstrate theoretically and numerically that metastable free-standing knots can also be realized in cholesteric droplets, and their topology is determined by chirality and confinement conditions.

    • David Seč
    • , Simon Čopar
    •  & Slobodan Žumer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Topological defects are observed in a range of active systems, but their dynamical properties are largely unknown. Here, the authors use a simulation of self-propelled hard-rods to generate topological defects in active nematics, finding that their anomalous dynamics may lead to large-scale collective motions.

    • Xia-qing Shi
    •  & Yu-qiang Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Theories predict the existence of a nematic liquid crystal phase with a local twist-bend structure, but no experimental proof is available over the past 40 years. Borshch et al.identify this phase for the first time in two different materials containing dimeric molecules.

    • V. Borshch
    • , Y.-K. Kim
    •  & O. D. Lavrentovich

Browse broader subjects

Browse Liquid crystals across other nature.com journals