Liquid crystals and the origin of life

The display screens of modern televisions, cell phones and computer monitors rely on liquid crystals—materials that flow like liquids but have molecules oriented in crystal-like structures. However, liquid crystals may ...

Research reveals how order first appears in liquid crystals

Liquid crystals undergo a peculiar type of phase change. At a certain temperature, their cigar-shaped molecules go from a disordered jumble to a more orderly arrangement in which they all point more or less in the same direction. ...

A new way to make biaxial nematic phase liquid crystals

A team of researchers from the University of Colorado in the U.S. and Université Paris-Saclay, in France has developed a new way to make biaxial nematic phase liquid crystals. In their paper published in the journal Science, ...

Researchers get on consumers' wavelength with InSb technology

The technology for controlling light absorption at selected wavelengths in nanostructures has garnered much attention in recent years; however, dynamically tuning absorption wavelengths without also changing the geometry ...

A paperlike LCD—thin, flexible, tough and cheap

Optoelectronic engineers in China and Hong Kong have manufactured a special type of liquid crystal display (LCD) that is paper-thin, flexible, light and tough. With this, a daily newspaper could be uploaded onto a flexible ...

Liquid crystal molecules form nano rings

At DESY's X-ray source PETRA III, scientists have investigated an intriguing form of self-assembly in liquid crystals: When the liquid crystals are filled into cylindrical nanopores and heated, their molecules form ordered ...

Advances in lasers get to the long and short of it

Since lasers were first developed, the demand for more adaptable lasers has only increased. Chiral nematic liquid crystals (CLCs) are an emerging class of lasing devices that are poised to shape how lasers are used in the ...

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