Humankind has been obsessed with knots in religion, culture and daily life for millennia,
while physicists like Gauss, Kelvin and Maxwell already involved them in models centuries …

This article reviews the physics of colloidal dispersions in nematic liquid crystals as a novel
challenging type of soft matter. We first investigate the nematic environment of one particle …

Topological defects in liquid crystals (LCs) have been widely used to organize colloidal
dispersions and template polymerization, leading to a range of assemblies, elastomers and …

This pedagogical overview of liquid crystals is based on lectures for postgraduate students
given at the International Max Planck Research School “Modeling of Soft Matter”. I am …

Because of their small mode volume and high Q-factors, optical microresonators are
interesting for applications such as laser sources, active filters and all-optical switches …

Colloids are abundant in nature, science, and technology, with examples ranging from milk
to quantum dots and the colloidal atom paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is …

Revolutionary developments in the fabrication of nanosized particles have created
enormous expectations in the last few years for the use of such materials in areas such as …

Phenomenological Landau–de Gennes modelling based on the free energy of nematic
liquid crystal colloids is reviewed. Nematic phase, gradient of order, and surface anchoring …

In recent years the design of chemical structures of liquid‐crystalline materials has
developed rapidly, and in many cases changed radically. Since Reinitzer's days, liquid …

Point defects in nematics, also called hedgehogs, are topological entities that have no
equivalent in ordered atomic solids, despite the homonymy. They have been the subject of …