Liquid Crystalline Soft Photonic Materials for Multimodal Optics.

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Liquid crystals are well-known for their applications in display devices. Nonetheless, they are great photonic materials too. Photonic structures made with liquid crystals, polymers and gels offer number of advantages including mobility, selfassembly, tuneability and ease of manufacturing. Hence there is a huge interest to develop novel methods of producing soft photonic structures, understanding their dynamics in guest-host systems. On the other hand, the behavior of the luminogens when suspended in liquid crystal media is extremely interesting. Generally, after a critical concentration, they tend to aggregate into nano-sized clusters and these nanoaggregates quench the luminescence property of the suspension. The aim of this project is to achieve responsive soft photonic systems which exhibit multimode optical properties such as scattering and emission for the next generation displays and sensors using liquid crystals as a templating medium. The project will involve careful chemical and electrical tailoring of the liquid crystal based composite materials. The student will work on engineering and understanding the physics of soft photonic materials, establish procedures to encapsulate photonic materials though microfluidics, understand the dynamics such as swelling and de-swelling of enclosures by systematic scattering and dynamics studies along with developing new device prototypes.