Controlling defects in engineered liquid crystals

Sitting with a joystick in the comfort of their chairs, scientists can play "rodeo" on a screen magnifying what is happening under their microscope. They rely on optical tweezers to manipulate an intangible ring created out of liquid crystal defects capable of attaching a microsphere to a long thin fibre. Maryam Nikkhou and colleagues from the Jožef Stefan Institute, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, recently published in EPJ E the results of work performed under the supervision of Igor Muševič. They believe that their findings could ultimately open the door to controlling the flow of light using light of a specific frequency in the Gigahertz range in liquid crystal photonic microdevices.

Liquid crystals are familiar to us from their application in LCD screens. What makes them so interesting is that they are rich in . Thanks to advances in manipulation tools such as , the authors were able to create an arbitrary number of defect pairs on a long thin fibre plunged into a nematic - an ordered fluid with long organic molecules all pointing in the same direction like sardines in a tin.


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More information: "Topological binding and elastic interactions of microspheres and fibres in a nematic liquid crystal." M. Nikkhou, M. Škarabot, and I. Muševič (2015), Eur. Phys. J. E 38: 23, DOI: 10.1140/epje/i2015-15023-6
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Citation: Controlling defects in engineered liquid crystals (2015, March 31) retrieved 23 July 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2015-03-defects-liquid-crystals.html

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