Related papers: Stretchable liquid crystal blue phase gels
The morphologies of two-dimensional (2D) crystals, nucleated, grown, and integrated within 2D elastic fluids, for instance in giant vesicle membranes, are dictated by an interplay of mechanics, permeability, and thermal contraction.…
Structural colors generated due to light scattering from static all-dielectric metasurfaces have successfully enabled high-resolution, high-saturation and wide-gamut color printing applications. Despite recent advances, most demonstrations…
As two-dimensional metamaterials, metasurfaces open up new avenues for designing static planar optics. However, the dynamic modulation of metasurfaces in the optical band is required for practical applications. The existing dynamic devices…
Collective motion of self-propelled organisms or synthetic particles often termed active fluid has attracted enormous attention in broad scientific community because of it fundamentally non-equilibrium nature. Energy input and interactions…
Non-linear photonic crystals can be used to provide phase-matching for frequency conversion in optically isotropic materials. The phase-matching mechanism proposed here is a combination of form birefringence and phase velocity dispersion in…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Polymer blends offer an exciting material for various potential applications due to their tunable properties by varying constituting components and their relative composition. Our simulation results unravel an intrinsic relationship between…
Active metasurfaces promise reconfigurable optics with drastically improved compactness, ruggedness, manufacturability, and functionality compared to their traditional bulk counterparts. Optical phase change materials (O-PCMs) offer an…
Nematic elastomers are a particular class of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) that exhibit both liquid-crystalline order and rubber (entropic) elasticity. This combination makes them stimuli-responsive soft materials with a number of…
Photomechanical actuation is demonstrated in two coupled liquid crystal elastomer photomechanical optical devices (PODs) acting in series. The response function of an individual POD is characterized and used to predict the temporal response…
Smectic blue phases (BPSm) are new mesophases of thermotropic liquid crystals, which exhibit a double geometrical frustration: the extension of chirality in three spatial dimensions like the classical blue phases, and helical twist…
We create a one-dimensional photonic crystal with strong polarization dependence and tunable by an applied electric field. We accomplish this in a planar microcavity by embedding a cholesteric liquid crystal (LC), which spontaneously forms…
Comparative study of thin film Cholesteric Liquid Crystal (CLC) lasers made from different materials and optically pumped by external solid state laser reveals a striking dependence of lasing behaviour (ranging from single mode at the edge…
The recent discovery of the ferroelectric splay nematic phase has opened the door to experimental investigation of one of the most searched liquid crystal phases in decades, with high expectations for future applications. However, at this…
Photonic molecules, i.e. artificial structures composed of coherently coupled optical cavities, are paradigmatic systems for investigating fundamental phenomena across photonics, quantum optics and topological physics. In recent years,…
When nematic liquid crystals are embedded in random polymer networks, the disordered environment disrupts the long-range order, producing a glassy state. If an electric field is applied, it induces large and fairly temperature-independent…
We present experiments which show that the partial wetting of droplets capped by taut elastic films is highly tunable. Adjusting the tension allows the contact angle and droplet morphology to be controlled. By exploiting these elastic…
Bulk properties of ionic liquid crystals are investigated using density functional theory. The liquid crystal molecules are represented by ellipsoidal particles with charges located in their center or at their tails. Attractive interactions…
Transformation optics has recently attracted extensive interest, since it provides a novel design methodology for manipulating light at will. Although transformation optics in principle embraces all forms of electromagnetic phenomena on all…