"Soft matter" was first proposed by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes in his Nobel acceptance speech in 1991. The term describes materials between aqueous substances and ideal solids. Soft matter materials with ...

The nematic liquid crystal phase is defined by long-range orientational order of anisotropic molecules without positional order. In its simplest uniaxial form, molecules align along a common axis ...

For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A wave of recent experiments is now tearing at those boundaries, revealing ...

Schematic diagram providing an overview of this review. Liquid crystals can be categorized into nematic, smectic, columnar, and cholesteric liquid crystals. Recently, metasurfaces have been integrated ...

An international group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that liquid crystals can condense into amazing structures under appropriate circumstances. They can form filaments and ...