Liquid crystals are all around us, from cell phone screens and video game consoles to car dashboards and medical devices. Run an electric current through liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and they ...

Thermotropic liquid crystals (LCs) underpin technologies from adaptive optics to responsive soft materials, yet their design is constrained by the difficulty of predicting two key phase transition ...

Soft-matter-based photonic crystals like blue-phase liquid crystals (BPLC) have potential applications in wide-ranging photonic and bio-chemical systems. To date, however, there are limitations in the ...

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Color plays a crucial role in our daily lives, from the clothes we wear to the screens we gaze at. Yet, traditional methods of creating color, which rely on chemical pigments and ...

The knots in your shoelaces are familiar, but can you imagine knots made from light, water, or from the structured fluids that make LCD screens shine? They exist, and in a new Nature Physics study, ...

Creating quantum light just became easier thanks to liquid crystals like the ones found in television screens. Team member Vitaliy Sultanov at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in ...

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), as a source of entangled photons, is of great interest for quantum physics and quantum technology, but so far it could be only implemented in solids.

Ions influence conductivity and mobility in molecular liquid crystals, affecting electrical behavior, stability, and performance in both established and emerging technologies. (Nanowerk Spotlight) The ...

Researchers have successfully grown platinum crystals in liquid metal, using a powerful X-ray technique giving rare insight into how these delicate crystals form and grow. More than a beautiful ...

Under the right conditions, liquid crystals condense into astonishing structures, spontaneously generating filaments and flattened discs that can transport material from one place to another, much ...