Nanoscopic Manipulation and Nanoimaging of Liquid Crystals – Charles Rosenblatt
Date: Mon. April 4th, 2016, 12:30 pm-1:30 pmLocation: Rockefeller 221
Liquid crystals present a remarkable array of fascinating physical phenomena, and are now a >200 billion dollar world-wide industry. As liquid crystals most often are housed in a closed cell or sit atop a substrate, the treatment of the substrate plays a pivotal role. For the past fifteen years we have developed and exploited scanning probe microscope techniques to manipulate the liquid crystal’s orientation and order parameter at a surface on length scales down to a few tens of nanometers, and performed optical imaging with volumetric resolution 1000 times better than confocal microscopy. In this talk I will present our experimental techniques at the nanoscale, and a sampling of our results that include phase transition behavior, chiral properties, and creation of controlled arrays of topological defects.