Smart soft materials are envisioned to be the building blocks of the next generation of
advanced devices and digitally augmented technologies. In this context, liquid crystals (LCs) …

Swarms, which stem from collective behaviors among individual elements, are commonly
seen in nature. Since two decades ago, scientists have been attempting to understand the …

Recent advances in surface-patterning techniques of liquid crystals have enabled the
precise creation of topological defects, which promise a variety of emergent applications …

Bacteria are among the oldest and most abundant species on Earth. Bacteria successfully
colonize diverse habitats and play a significant role in the oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen …

Liquid crystals (LCs) are ubiquitous in display technologies. The orientational ordering in the
nematic phase of LCs gives rise to structural anisotropy, the ability to form topological …

Microrotors are microscopic objects that convert energy stored in the environment into
spontaneous rotation, in the form of spinning along an axis, rolling on a surface, or orbiting …

Topological structures, such as topological defects, solitons, and vortices, are key to
understanding the collective dynamics and spontaneous flows in active soft matter and are …

Electrically powered solitons are particle-like field configurations in out-of-equilibrium
nematics that have garnered significant interest. However, their random generation and lack …

Logic operations performed by semiconductor-based transistors are the basis of modern
computing. There is considerable interest in creating autonomous materials systems …

Recent experiments have shown that the complex spatio-temporal vortex structures
emerging in active fluids are susceptible to weak geometrical constraints. This observation …