Related papers: Spatially twisted liquid-crystal devices
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
We demonstrate several examples of driving and steering of colloids when dispersed in nematic liquid crystals. The driving mechanism is based on the principle of nonlinear electrophoresis which is mediated by the asymmetry in the structure…
We study living liquid crystals (LLCs), which are an amalgam of nematic liquid crystals (LCs) and active matter (AM). These LLCs are placed in contact with surfaces which impose planar/homeotropic boundary conditions on the director field…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces which emerged in the course of the last few decades have revolutionized our understanding of light and light-matter interaction. While solid materials are naturally employed as key building elements…
It is well known that the alignment of liquid crystals can be realized by rubbing or photoalignment technologies. Recently nonlinear laser lithography was introduced as a fast, relatively low-cost method for large area nano-grating…
We present nonlinear dynamic equations for nematic and smectic $A$ liquid crystals in the presence of an alternating electric field and explain their derivation in detail. The local electric field acting in any liquid-crystalline system is…
A switchable metasurface composed of plasmonic split ring resonators and a dye-doped liquid crystal is developed. The transmission of the metasurface in the infrared spectral range can be changed by illuminating the dye-doped liquid crystal…
The control of light by light is one of the main aims in modern photonics. In this context, a fundamental cornerstone is the realization of light-written waveguides in real time, resulting in all-optical reconfigurability of communication…
We present a liquid-crystal laser device based on the chiral ferroelectric nematic phase (NF*). The laser medium is obtained by mixing a ferroelectric nematic material with a chiral agent and a small proportion of a fluorescent dye.…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
We demonstrate targeting and control over spatiotemporal chaos in an optical feedback loop experiment. Different stationary target patterns are stabilized in real-time by means of a two dimensional space extended perturbation field driven…
Pure liquids in thermodynamic equilibrium are structurally homogeneous. In liquid crystals, flow and light pulses are used to create reconfigurable domains with polar order. Moreover, through careful engineering of concerted microfluidic…
In uniaxial soft matter with a reorientational nonlinearity, such as nematic liquid crystals, a light beam in the extraordinary polarization walks off its wavevector due to birefringence, while it undergoes self-focusing via an increase in…
A theoretical model of shape-anisometric particles embedded in a cubic lattice is formulated for binary mixtures combining rod-like, plate-like and spherical particles. The model aims at providing a tool for the prediction and…
Waveplates having spatially varying fast-axis orientation and retardance provide an elegant and easy way to locally manipulate different attributes of light beams namely, polarization, amplitude and phase, leading to the generation of…
With reference to spatially non-local nematic liquid crystals, we develop a theory of optical spatial solitons and modulational instability in anisotropic media with arbitrarily large birefringence. Asymmetric spatial profiles and…
Random lasers (RL) emit light through multiple scattering in disordered gain media, typically resulting in isotropic emission with limited directionality control. Controlling RL emission direction in compact systems remains a challenge.…
Active nematics are materials composed of mobile, elongated particles that can transform energy from the environment into a mechanical motion. Current experimental realizations of the active nematics are of biological origin and include…
The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of…