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Molecular-Colloidal Liquid Crystals
A promising approach of designing mesostructured materials with novel physical behavior is based on combining unique optical and electronic properties of solid nanoparticles with long-range ordering and facile switching of soft matter. This lecture will describe how we experimentally realize molecular-colloidal organic-inorganic composites formed via multi-scale self-assembly in dispersions of anisotropic inorganic nanoparticles in liquid crystals. These composites can be pre-engineered to exhibit novel plasmonic, luminescence, photon-up-converting, and other unusual optical properties controlled by low-voltage fields and light itself. Enriched by the anisotropic elastic and surface anchoring interactions, liquid crystal colloids also exhibit a surprisingly rich and interesting soft matter behavior, which will be the focus of this presentation.