Liquid crystals constitute a fascinating class of soft condensed matter characterized by the
counterintuitive combination of fluidity and long-range order. Today they are best known for …

The homotopy theory of topological defects is a powerful tool for organizing and unifying
many ideas across a broad range of physical systems. Recently, experimental progress was …

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 …

Featured Application Nanomaterial-doped liquid crystals. Abstract The research field of
liquid crystals and their applications is recently changing from being largely focused on …

Topology has long been considered as an abstract mathematical discipline with little
connection to material science. Here we demonstrate that control over spatial and temporal …

I started the work on liquid crystal colloids around the year 2000 as a continuation of our
experiments on forces between surfaces in liquid crystals. We were using the atomic force …

We present experimental and theoretical study of colloidal interactions in quadrupolar
nematic liquid crystal colloids, confined to a thin planar nematic cell. Using the laser …

Liquid crystals (LCs) are fluids within which molecules exhibit long-range orientational
order, leading to anisotropic properties such as optical birefringence and curvature elasticity …

Many living and artificial systems show similar emergent behavior and collective motions on
different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of …

In this Letter, we demonstrate that the symmetry of the elastic interaction between the dipolar
and quadrupolar colloidal particles in the nematic liquid crystal leads to a novel variety of 2D …