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Machines designed for operation in Space, as well as other extreme environments, need to be both resilient and adaptable when mission parameters change. Soft robots offer advantages in adaptability, but most lack resilience to the pressure…
The temporally switchable optical mode conversion is crucial for optical communication and computing applications. This research demonstrates such optically switchable mode converter driven by thermo-optic refraction. The MoS2 nanofluid is…
Thanks to their unique properties, nematic liquid crystals feature a variety of mechanisms for light-matter interactions. For continuous-wave optical excitations, the two dominant contributions stem from reorientational and thermal…
Vitrimers, an important subset of dynamically crosslinked polymer networks, have many technological applications for their excellent properties, and the ability to be re-processed through plastic flow above the so-called vitrification…
Liquid crystal networks exploit the coupling between the responsivity of liquid-crystalline mesogens, e.g., to electric fields, and the (visco)elastic properties of a polymer network. Because of this, these materials have been put forward…
Light dragging refers to the change in the path of light passing through a moving medium. This effect enables accurate detection of very slow speeds of light, which have prominent applications in state transfer, quantum gate operations, and…
Deviations of molecular shapes from spherical symmetry may give rise to a variety of novel phenomena, including their dynamic behavior. It has recently been predicted [Mazza \textit{et al}. Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{105}, 227802 (2010)] that…
Nanoconfined liquid crystals (LCs) and their nanocomposites are driving the next generation of photonic applications. Consequently, deepening our understanding of mesophase stability, defect topology, and the dynamic response of LCs at the…
Magnetic programming soft machines has great development prospects in the fields of minimally invasive medicine, wearable device and soft robot. However, unrepeatable magnetization and low modulus limits their applications. So far, there…
Current methods for fabricating lenses rely on mechanical processing of the lens or mold, such as grinding, machining, and polishing. The complexity of these fabrication processes and the required specialized equipment prohibit rapid…
Computer simulations are presented of the isotropic-to-nematic transition in a liquid crystal confined between two parallel plates a distance H apart. The plates are neutral and do not impose any anchoring on the particles. Depending on the…
Transport of fluids and particles at the microscale is an important theme both in fundamental and applied science. One of the most successful approaches is to use an electric field, which requires the system to carry or induce electric…
We demonstrate that a first order isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals can be succesfully modeled within the generalized Landau-de Gennes theory by selecting an appropriate combination of elastic constants. The numerical…
Transformation optics (TO) is a new tool for controlling electromagnetic fields. In the context of metamaterial technology, it provides a direct link between a desired electromagnetic (EM) phenomenon and the material response required for…
In this paper we investigate the dynamics of liquid crystal textures in a two-dimensional nematic under applied electric fields, using numerical simulations performed using a publicly available LIquid CRystal Algorithm (LICRA) developed by…
Polarization dependence of opto-mechanical behavior of monodomain photochromic glassy liquid crystal (LC) polymers under polarized ultraviolet light (PUV) is studied. Trans-cis photo-isomerization is generally known to be most intense at…
We study the equilibria of a photoresponsive nematic elastomer ribbon within a continuum theory that builds upon the statistical mechanics model put forward by Corbett and Warner [Phys. Rev. E 78, 061701 (2008)]. We prove that the…
We report experiments that show rapid crystallization of colloids tethered to an oil-water interface in response to laser illumination. This light-induced transition is due to a combination of long-ranged thermophoretic pumping and local…
Single crystal nematic elastomers undergo a transition from a strongly ordered phase N to an "isotropic" phase I. We show that: (a) samples produced under tension by the Finkelmann procedure are intrinsically anisotropic and should show a…
We demonstrate optical trapping and manipulation of defects and transparent microspheres in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). The three-dimensional director fields and positions of the particles are visualized using the Fluorescence Confocal…