Liquid Crystalline Soft Photonic Materials for Multimodal Optics.

液晶因其在显示装置中的应用而众所周知。然而，它们也是很好的光子材料。用液晶、聚合物和凝胶制成的光子结构提供了许多优点，包括移动性、自组装、调谐和易于制造。因此，有一个巨大的兴趣，开发新的方法来生产软光子结构，了解他们的动态宾主系统。另一方面，悬浮在液晶介质中的发光体的行为是非常有趣的。通常，在达到临界浓度后，它们往往会聚集成纳米尺寸的簇，并且这些纳米聚集体会猝灭悬浮液的发光性质。 该项目的目的是实现响应性软光子系统，该系统具有多模光学特性，例如使用液晶作为模板介质的下一代显示器和传感器的散射和发射。该项目将涉及液晶基复合材料的仔细化学和电气定制。学生将致力于工程和理解软光子材料的物理学，建立通过微流体封装光子材料的程序，通过系统的散射和动力学研究沿着开发新的设备原型来理解动力学，如外壳的膨胀和去膨胀。

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.