Colloidal self-assembly approaches to smart nanostructured materials

Z Li, Q Fan, Y Yin - Chemical reviews, 2021 - ACS Publications
Colloidal self-assembly refers to a solution-processed assembly of nanometer-/micrometer-
sized, well-dispersed particles into secondary structures, whose collective properties are …

Nature‐inspired emerging chiral liquid crystal nanostructures: from molecular self‐assembly to DNA mesophase and nanocolloids

L Wang, AM Urbas, Q Li - Advanced Materials, 2020 - Wiley Online Library
Liquid crystals (LCs) are omnipresent in living matter, whose chirality is an elegant and
distinct feature in certain plant tissues, the cuticles of crabs, beetles, arthropods, and …

Anisotropic magnetic nanoparticles: A review of their properties, syntheses and potential applications

D Lisjak, A Mertelj - Progress in Materials Science, 2018 - Elsevier
Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) are of great scientific interest because of the size effect
associated with their magnetic properties and, even more so, because of their wide-ranging …

Knots and other new topological effects in liquid crystals and colloids

II Smalyukh - Reports on Progress in Physics, 2020 - iopscience.iop.org
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 …

Spontaneous helielectric nematic liquid crystals: Electric analog to helimagnets

X Zhao, J Zhou, J Li, J Kougo, Z Wan… - Proceedings of the …, 2021 - National Acad Sciences
Recently, a type of ferroelectric nematic fluid has been discovered in liquid crystals in which
the molecular polar nature at molecule level is amplified to macroscopic scales through a …

Liquid crystal defect structures with Möbius strip topology

H Zhao, JSB Tai, JS Wu, II Smalyukh - Nature Physics, 2023 - nature.com
Topological solitons commonly appear as energy-minimizing field configurations, but
examples of stable, spatially localized objects with coexisting solitonic structures and …

Diversity of knot solitons in liquid crystals manifested by linking of preimages in torons and hopfions

PJ Ackerman, II Smalyukh - Physical Review X, 2017 - APS
Topological solitons are knots in continuous physical fields classified by nonzero Hopf index
values. Despite arising in theories that span many branches of physics, from elementary …

Liquid crystal colloids

II Smalyukh - Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, 2018 - annualreviews.org
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 …

Static three-dimensional topological solitons in fluid chiral ferromagnets and colloids

PJ Ackerman, II Smalyukh - Nature materials, 2017 - nature.com
Abstract Three-dimensional (3D) topological solitons are continuous but topologically
nontrivial field configurations localized in 3D space and embedded in a uniform far-field …

Hopfions, heliknotons, skyrmions, torons and both abelian and nonabelian vortices in chiral liquid crystals

JS Wu, II Smalyukh - Liquid Crystals Reviews, 2022 - Taylor & Francis
Widely known for their uses in displays and electro-optics, liquid crystals are more than just
technological marvels. They vividly reveal the topology and structure of various solitonic and …