Research

 

Current projects include:

Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals • lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals • twist-bend nematics • heliconical cholesterics • electrophoresis and electro-osmosis enabled by liquid crystals • nanosecond electro-optics • living liquid crystals • topological defects • chirality and confinement • materials for transformation optic

 

Recent Highlights


 


 

Hend M. Baza successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on "Dynamics of Liquid Crystal Based Active Matter". Congratulations Dr. Baza! January 10, 2024

 

 

Lydia Vander Ark, an REU-Summer 2023 student, presents her research on liquid crystal materials in Oleg D. Lavrentovich’s group. July 26, 2023

 


Mojtaba Rajabi successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on "Dynamics of active colloids in liquid crystal environment". Congratulations!

 

 

Ferroelectric nematic liquids with conics has been published by Priyanka Kumari et al in Nature Communications and featured on editors’ highlights webpage.

 


Runa Koizumi successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on "Topology and geometry guided structures in equilibrium and out of equilibriium LCs". Congratulations!

 

 

Lab Pumpkin 2022, showing some nice features of the ferronematic.

 


Olena Iadlovska successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on "Electro-Optics of Oblique Helicoidal Cholesterics". Congratulations!

 

 

Taras Turiv, recent Ph.D. graduate, was awarded the Glenn H. Brown award from the International Liquid Crystal Society for his Ph.D. dissertation on "Dynamics of Living and Inanimate Microparticles Controlled by Nematic Liquid Crystal". Congratulations!

 


Toroidal nuclei of columnar lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals coexisting with an isotropic phase has been published by Runa Koizumi et al in Soft Matter and highlighted at the cover page.

 

 

Turaba Rahman, undergraduate Physics major, joined the group during summer 2022 as part of the SURE (Summer Undergraduate Research Experience) program. Her research was on "Effect of substrate polarity and electric field on the capillary flow of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal". Her research abstract got accepted at the 14th Undergraduate Research symposium in West Virginia University. Congratulations, and well done!

 


Congratulations to Priyanka for winning the AMLCI Image Contest. The picture shows conic section textures in an NF material where the bottom surface is degenerate and the top surface is free.

 

 

Runa, Mojtaba, and Hend received the best oral presentation award at the 36th Annual Graduate Research Symposium at Kent State.