We have been exploring elastic energies stored in director fields by confining nematics in vessels with well-defined anchoring conditions to guide colloids to assemble in reconfigurable structures. Colloids seed defects into the liquid crystal, which interact with distorted director fields and defects to form ordered structures. Corners are rich sites for imposing highly distorted director fields and defects, allowing us to generate a number of interesting associated assemblies. Gently curved wells are also interesting sites for localizing particles and guiding structure formation. In this talk, I describe a series of studies for colloids immersed in nematics and trapped at their interfaces, and the properties of the structures that form.

Confined liquid crystals: Harnessing director fields to direct colloid assembly

251st National Meeting (2016)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.