Theory of electrostriction of liquid-crystalline blue phases I and II

Theory of electrostriction of liquid-crystalline blue phases I and II.

Liquid Crystalline Blue Phases and Swimmer Hydrodynamics

Soft condensed matter is concerned with the wide variety of materials, ranging from polymers to foams, that are neither crystalline, nor gaseous, but lie somewhere in between. In this thesis, we shall describe two such “soft” systems: liquid crystalline blue phases and the hydrodynamics of microscopic swimming creatures. Blue phases epitomise the term liquid crystal, possessing three-dimensiona...

Anomalies of the temperature dependence of electrostriction in blue phases

We investigated the field-induced Shift of the blue phase diffraction bands. The temperature dependence of the electrostriction tensor components is determined for the first time. In the blue phase BPI at constant field strength E fl [001], a change of the temperture leads to a change of both the unit cell volume and its shape. The deformation of the unit cell displays a pretransitional behavio...

Three-dimensional colloidal crystals in liquid crystalline blue phases.

Applications for photonic crystals and metamaterials put stringent requirements on the characteristics of advanced optical materials, demanding tunability, high Q factors, applicability in visible range, and large-scale self-assembly. Exploiting the interplay between structural and optical properties, colloidal lattices embedded in liquid crystals (LCs) are promising candidates for such materia...

Liquid Crystalline Phases of DNA

The DNA molecule is the support of the genetic information. It is a right-handed double helix, 22 angstrom in diameter, and 50 nm in the persistence length. The two strands of the helix are complementary in their nucleotide sequence with about 10 nucleotide pairs per helical turn. DNA is a long and strongly charged heteropolymer. It bears on average one elementary negative charge per each 0.17 ...