The colours in this newly discovered phase of liquid crystal shift as researchers apply a small electric field. Credit: SMRC Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have become the first to ...

More than 100 years after a pair of imaginative physicists first proposed a new phase of liquid crystal, scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have managed to produce it and have been left ...

As reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder's Soft Materials Research Center (SMRC) have discovered a "ferroelectric ...

Nematic materials are made of elongated molecules that align in a preferred direction, but, like in a fluid, are spaced out irregularly. The best-known nematic materials are liquid crystals, which are ...

Topological defects that form on surfaces of ordered media, dubbed boojums, are ubiquitous in superfluids, liquid crystals (LCs), Langmuir monolayers, and Bose-Einstein condensates. They determine ...

Defect bits: representation of two n-bits along a defect line (shown in black). Shown are the orientations of the rod-like molecules that comprise liquid crystals. (Courtesy: Žiga Kos and Jörn ...

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.

A team at the University of Colorado Boulder has designed new kinds of liquid crystals that mirror the complex structures of some solid crystals—a major step forward in building flowing materials that ...

Ripples and imperfections in liquid crystals like those found in TVs could be used to build a new type of computer. Žiga Kos at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and Jörn Dunkel at the ...

Randomly positioned in parallel, nematic LCs react quickly to electric fields, which is why they are used in the great majority of LCD screens. Meaning "thread" in Greek, nematic LCs are monostable ...