event
Thursday 06 Sep 2018: NEST Seminar: Liquid Crystal based Composites: Interplay of self-organization, chirality, polymers and nanomaterials
Dr Ingo Dierking - University of Manchester
H170 12:30-13:30
Given the fact that we can buy flat panel TVs, laptops and mobile phones at very reasonable prices, one may come to the conclusion that liquid crystal research is now complete. Yet, one could not be further from reality. Besides the obvious applications in the electro-optic sector, liquid crystals (LCs) are used as a vehicle in the fundamental sciences to study topics as diverse as topological defects, fractal structures, self-organized ordering of nanomaterials, defect annihilation, growth and coarsening, all the way to soft, anisotropic composites and biological systems. We will discuss a few of the diverse range of materials studied, such as polymer stabilized liquid crystals, ferroelectrics and smectic layer instabilities, Blue Phases doped with nanomaterials, and graphene oxide liquid crystals, and will, besides the fundamental impact, also point out the novel application directions that such materials may offer.
