Sculpting stable structures in pure liquids

Abstract

Pure liquids in thermodynamic equilibrium are structurally homogeneous. In liquid crystals, flow and light pulses are used to create reconfigurable domains with polar order. Moreover, through careful engineering of concerted microfluidic flows and localized opto-thermal fields, it is possible to achieve complete control over the nucleation, growth, and shape of such domains. Experiments, theory, and simulations indicate that the resulting structures can be stabilized indefinitely, provided the liquids are maintained in a controlled non-equilibrium state. The resulting sculpted liquids could find applications in microfluidic devices for selective encapsulation of solutes and particles into optically active compartments that interact with external stimuli.

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Topological structure and dynamics of three dimensional active nematics
• Microfluidic control over topological states in channel-confined nematic flows
• Fast, scalable, and interactive software for Landau-de Gennes numerical modeling of nematic topological defects
• Kinematics and dynamics of disclination lines in three-dimensional nematics
• Time dependent lyotropic chromonic textures in PDMS-based microfluidic confinements
• Minimization principle for shear alignment of liquid crystals
• Complex-tensor theory of simple smectics
• Spatio-temporal programming of lyotropic phase transition in nanoporous microfluidic confinements
• Multistable polar textures in geometrically frustrated nematic liquid crystals
• Nematic liquid crystal flow driven by time-varying active surface anchoring
• Defect Interactions Through Periodic Boundaries in Two-Dimensional $p$-atics