Liquid crystals articles within Nature Materials

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Light-induced artificial goosebumps on liquid crystal elastomer skin are used to precisely manipulate passive microstructures, achieving a localized and controllable system for programmable micromachines.

    • Mingchao Zhang
    • , Aniket Pal
    •  & Metin Sitti

  • Article |

    Employing light-transformable polymers, multiple physical unclonable functions are demonstrated within a single device with all-optical reversible reconfigurability. Such devices may enable quantum secure authentication and nonlinear cryptographic key generation applications.

    • Sara Nocentini
    • , Ulrich Rührmair
    •  & Francesco Riboli

  • Article |

    Liquid crystal (LC) applications typically rely on defining the non-topological spatial patterns of the optical axis. Here, the authors demonstrate the topological steering of light by LC nematic vortices, futher establishing an analogy between topological light steering by LC vortices and cosmic strings.

    • Cuiling Meng
    • , Jin-Sheng Wu
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Article |

    The large-scale fabrication of cellulose nanocrystal photonic films in a roll-to-roll device is achieved by careful optimization of the cellulose nanocrystal formulation and its controlled deposition and drying on a substrate. Once dry, these photonic films can be peeled and milled into effect pigments, highlighting the potential of cellulose nanocrystals as a sustainable material for industrial photonic applications.

    • Benjamin E. Droguet
    • , Hsin-Ling Liang
    •  & Silvia Vignolini

  • Article |

    Upon light stimulation, two jointed liquid crystalline network oscillators affect the movement of each other, achieving synchronized in-phase and anti-phase oscillations that can be explored to generate soft actuators with collective responses.

    • Ghislaine Vantomme
    • , Lars C. M. Elands
    •  & Dirk J. Broer

  • News & Views |

    Photonic crystals with optical bandgaps across the entire visible spectrum are generated by reconfiguring three-dimensional blue phase liquid crystalline lattices into long-lived metastable non-cubic structures using sequences of electric pulses.

    • Slobodan Žumer

  • News & Views |

    Physical confinement and magnetic fields are used to align organic molecules that self-assemble into large-size single crystals with perfect positional order.

    • Andrei V. Petukhov

  • News & Views |

    The chirality of colloids dispersed in achiral liquid crystals shapes colloidal dynamics and interactions, giving rise to chiral supramolecular assemblies and attractive or repulsive colloidal motions.

    • Karthik Nayani
    • , Young-Ki Kim
    •  & Nicholas L. Abbott

  • Article |

    Colloidal chiral springs and helices are formed by light inside a nematic liquid crystal suspension, predefining the mesoscopic superstructures self-assembled in such systems.

    • Ye Yuan
    • , Angel Martinez
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Article |

    DNA origami allows the design of rod-shaped particles with specific geometrical features. This is exploited to examine how particle-level characteristics affect properties of the bulk phase and the superstructures such colloids assemble into.

    • Mahsa Siavashpouri
    • , Christian H. Wachauf
    •  & Zvonimir Dogic

  • News & Views |

    Topological defects in liquid crystals guide the self-assembly of molecular amphiphiles.

    • Francesca Serra
    •  & Shu Yang

  • Letter |

    Experiments and coarse-grained simulations show, in an active system based on microtubules, a system-spanning phase of motile defects with orientational order that persists over hours despite a defect lifetime of seconds.

    • Stephen J. DeCamp
    • , Gabriel S. Redner
    •  & Zvonimir Dogic

  • Letter |

    Liquid-crystalline elastomers combine rubber-like elasticity with the optical properties of liquid crystals, yet some of their properties depend on the particular liquid-crystal phase. Now, stretchable gels of the liquid-crystalline blue-phase I are reported. The blue-phase gels are electro-optically switchable under a moderate applied voltage, and their optical properties can be manipulated by an applied strain.

    • F. Castles
    • , S. M. Morris
    •  & H. J. Coles

  • News & Views |

    The macroscopic alignment of dilute dispersions of graphene oxide can be controlled, with extremely large optical sensitivity, through the application of weak electric fields.

    • Ju Young Kim
    •  & Sang Ouk Kim

  • News & Views |

    Knot-shaped micrometric tubes embedded in a liquid crystal induce the formation of defect lines that loop around the knotted tubes to form knots.

    • William T. M. Irvine
    •  & Dustin Kleckner

  • Letter |

    Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals induce nematic fields and topological defects that are dictated by the topology of the colloidal particles. However, little is known about such interplay of topologies. It is now shown that knot-shaped microparticles in liquid crystals induce defect lines that get entangled with the colloidal knots, and that such mutually tangled configurations satisfy topological constraints and follow predictions from knot theory.

    • Angel Martinez
    • , Miha Ravnik
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Letter |

    A requirement for the reversible mechanical actuation of liquid-crystal elastomers is macroscale alignment. However, current processing techniques do not achieve reliable and robust alignment, which limits the practical use of these materials as actuators and artificial muscles. It is now shown that by introducing polymers with exchangeable covalent bonds, liquid-crystal elastomers can be easily processed and aligned, and subsequently remodelled.

    • Zhiqiang Pei
    • , Yang Yang
    •  & Yan Ji

  • News & Views |

    In a uniformly aligned liquid crystal, colloidal particles having a number of holes give rise to arrays of topological defects that are associated with the particles' topology.

    • Eugene Terentjev

  • News & Views |

    Three-dimensional ordering in liquid-crystalline polymers is induced by the photopolymerization of a mixture of mesogens sandwiched between two patterned substrates. By incorporating an infrared-sensitive dye in the mixture, polymer films that undergo reversible shape deformations on heating are formed.

    • Gustavo Fernández

  • Letter |

    Liquid-crystalline order can be templated in a material by refilling a photopolymerized liquid-crystal cast with the material after the non-polymerized portion has been washed out. This approach has now been used to template, in achiral liquid crystals, chiral three-dimensional blue phases with unprecedented thermal stability that are suitable for narrowband mirrorless lasing and switchable electro-optic devices.

    • F. Castles
    • , F. V. Day
    •  & H. J. Coles

  • News & Views |

    Memory effects resulting from frustration and topology in nematic liquid crystals confined in bicontinuous structures may enable the fabrication of geometrically functionalized materials.

    • Igor Muševič
    •  & Slobodan Žumer

  • Article |

    Computer simulations of nematic liquid crystals confined in bicontinuous porous geometries show that frustration and topology lead to multiple, metastable trajectories of defect lines that can be memorized on application of external fields. These topologically enabled metastable states could be exploited to optically functionalize orientationally ordered materials.

    • Takeaki Araki
    • , Marco Buscaglia
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • Article |

    Monte Carlo simulations are performed to study the assembly of polyhedrons into various mesophases and crystalline states. The formation of new liquid-crystalline and plastic-crystalline phases is predicted at intermediate volume fractions and, by correlating these results with particle anisotropy and rotational symmetry, guidelines for predicting phase behaviour are proposed.

    • Umang Agarwal
    •  & Fernando A. Escobedo

  • Letter |

    Polymeric impurities in liquid crystals are known to perturb liquid-crystalline order. It is now shown that spatial gradients in the order, created by illuminating the materials with ultraviolet light, can be used to generate forces that allow the polymers to be concentrated or dispersed in the liquid crystal.

    • Sadaki Samitsu
    • , Yoichi Takanishi
    •  & Jun Yamamoto

  • Article |

    Peptide-based molecules that self-assemble into lamellar plaques with fibrous texture on heating, subsequently break on cooling to form long-range aligned bundles of nanofibres. This thermal route to monodomain gels is compatible for living cells and allows the formation of noodle-like viscoelastic strings of any length.

    • Shuming Zhang
    • , Megan A. Greenfield
    •  & Samuel I. Stupp

  • News & Views |

    Stable particle-like molecular architectures are written in a frustrated chiral-nematic liquid crystal using a vortex laser beam. This fundamentally new mechanism to form toroidal features with anisotropic optical properties has great potential to create new applications in liquid-crystal photonics.

    • Dirk J. Broer

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