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Materials exhibiting a large caloric effect could lead to the development of new generation of heat-management technologies that will have better energy efficiency and be potentially more environmentally friendly. The focus of caloric…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
An elastomer swelling actuator deforms by absorbing a fluid, thus generating mechanical movement. We show that depositing small droplets of low molecular weight liquid crystal on liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) films leads to shape changes…
Highly engineered materials are arousing great interest because of their ability to manipulate heat, as described by coordinate transformation approach. Based on the recently developed analog gravity models, this paper presents how a simple…
A range of monodomain nematic liquid crystal elastomers containing differing proportions of photo-isomerisable mesogenic moieties, which turn from a rod-like to a kinked shape upon ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, was studied. Depending on the…
Liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) has been intensively utilized in 4D printing techniques to fabricate smart structures with reversible actuation on the basis of appropriate alignment of liquid crystal (LC) molecules. As a non-contact…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
We consider planar liquid crystal elastomers: two dimensional objects made of anisotropic responsive materials, that upon activation remain flat however change their planar shape. We derive a closed form, analytical solution based on the…
Active elastomeric liquid crystal particles with initial cylindrical shapes are obtained by means of soft lithography and polymerization in a strong magnetic field. Gold nanocrystals infiltrated into these particles mediate energy transfer…
We investigate Isotropic - Nematic transition in liquid crystal elastomers employing non-Boltzmann Monte Carlo techniques. We consider a lattice model of a liquid elastomer and Selinger-Jeon-Ratna Hamiltonian which accounts for…
Imaging techniques are essential tools for inquiring a number of properties from different materials. Liquid crystals are often investigated via optical and image processing methods. In spite of that, considerably less attention has been…
Liquid crystal elastomers are special cross-linked polymer materials combining the large elastic deformability of elastomers with the orientational orders of liquid crystals. This model exhibits markedly different phenomena than the liquid…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
The nonlinear component of the optomechanical interaction between light and mechanical vibration promises many exciting classical and quantum mechanical applications, but is generally weak. Here we demonstrate enhancement of nonlinear…
We present a tunable liquid crystal device that converts pure orbital angular momentum eigenmodes of a light beam into equal-weight superpositions of opposite-handed eigenmodes and vice versa. For specific input states, the device may thus…
Nematic elastomers are programmable soft materials that display large, reversible and predictable deformation under an external stimulus such as a change in temperature or light. While much of the work in the field has focused on actuation…
Using dynamic light scattering, we measure for the first time the temperature-dependent elastic moduli and associated orientational viscosity coefficients of the nematic phase in a self-assembled lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal. The bend…
Topological photonics harnesses the physics of topological insulators to control the behavior of light. Photonic modes robust against material imperfections are an example of such control. In this work, we propose a soft-matter platform…
Vertically aligned mono-domain nematic liquid crystal elastomers contract when heated. If a temperature gradient is applied across the width of such a cantilever, inhomogeneous strain distribution leads to bending motion. We modelled the…