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Liquid crystals are substances that flow like a liquid but maintain some of the ordered structure of crystals. Liquid-crystal molecules tend to be elongated and to orient in specific directions.
Miniature passive fliers are of interest, but there are challenges in controlling their motion. Here, the authors report the use of light-responsive thin films for optical control of the gliding of passive fliers.
The authors investigate the origins of chirality transfer across length scales, quantitatively demonstrating how chirality propagates from the molecular to liquid crystal level in filamentous virus systems.
On-demand color control, enabling simultaneous and omni-directional wavelength tuning towards both shorter (blue-shift) and longer (red-shift) wavelengths, is reported using stretchable chiral liquid crystal elastomers.
Robin Neuder and colleagues investigate liquid crystals for phase tuning in reconfigurable intelligent surfaces based on defected delay lines. This approach enables liquid crystal reconfigurable intelligent surfaces that can be optimized towards wide bandwidth, low loss, and fast response time simultaneously.
Schematic illustrations of the alignment behavior induced by SWaP. Photopolymerization was conducted with a scanned UV slit light. Uniaxial molecular alignment was induced when the polymer concentration in the exposure area was high, while it was random when the polymer concentration was low.
Studies of a biological active nematic fluid reveal a spontaneous self-constraint that arises between self-motile topological defects and mesoscale coherent flow structures. The defects follow specific contours of the flow field, on which vorticity and strain rate balance, and hence, contrary to expectation, they break mirror symmetry.
The liquid-crystal-like order of cells in epithelial tissues aids rearrangements, but there is disagreement over the dominant liquid crystal phase. Now, a unified approach reveals that two distinct symmetries dominate at different scales.
The guiding of magnetic fields by soft ferromagnetic solids is well known and exploited in magnetic shielding applications. Now, ferroelectric nematic liquids are shown to analogously guide electric fields.
Liquid crystal defect structures with topology similar to a Möbius strip can rotate, translate and transform into one another under an applied electric field.