ELFT HÍRADÓ

[StatFizSzeminar <statfiz AT glu.elte.hu>]

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                   ELTE Institute of Physics
                SEMINARS IN STATISTICAL PHYSICS


                         6th April 2016
                       Wednesday, 11 a.m.

                          Antal Jákli

  Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA
          (MTA SZFI, Wigner Kutatóközpont, Budapest)

               "Active Topics in Liquid Crystals"


After an intense research and development started in late 1950s, today liquid
crystal displays (LCD) are ubiquitous in our every-day-life, and the science 
of
liquid crystals is often considered to be mature, if not boring. In this talk 
I
would like to convince the audience that liquid crystal research is still 
active
with a number of hot topics. Among them I will give a brief (and certainly
subjective) summary about the recent advances in liquid crystal colloids,
elastomers and bent-core liquid crystals. Concerning liquid crystal colloids I
will emphasize their unique electrodynamics that is related to collective
phenomena studied by Vicsek et al. Liquid crystal elastomers offer interesting
opto- and thermo-mechanical effects. Among them I will talk about dynamic dry
fibrillar adhesives mimicking smart climbing ability of geckos. Finally, I 
will
show that bent-shape molecules not only uniquely combine chirality and 
polarity
of smectic liquid crystals, but also have led to the discovery of a new 
nematic
phase after the over 125 years old discovery of nematic phases used in today's
LCDs.


                          Room 2.54
     1117 Budapest, Pázmány P. sétány 1/A (Northern Block)
              home page: http://glu.elte.hu/~statfiz


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