Smectics and distorted nematics: analytics, numerics, and experiments
18-22 mai 2026
Ecole de physique "Les houches"
aux houches, dans la vallée de Chamonix - Les Houches (France)
There has been a recent explosion of interest in exploiting the ability of smectics, as a paradigmatic example of a layered fluid, to repeatedly self-assemble over device length-scales. Applications have been driven by advances in surface control that leverage surface patterning, topographical features such as grooves or posts, confinement in droplets, or adsorption on curved surfaces to produce emergent patterns that are optically active as lenses, gratings, photonic crystals, or lithographic templates. Moreover, defect structures in the texture can be used to efficiently trap dispersed nano-particles making these materials useful for hierarchical or synergistic assembly processes that could potentially be adopted for metamaterial, sensor, or solar cell production. Smectic liquid crystals share the ability of easily forming topological defects with the other liquid crystal phases. The interest in liquid crystals thus stems not only from their significant role in technological applications, but also because they share this property with other more exotic and harder to study materials and phenomena in basic science. A liquid crystal is an ideal testbed to verify experimentally theoretical predictions, since in other fields, e.g., in cosmology or for fractons, experiments may be difficult to conduct. It is thus of interest to foster connections and exchanges between the scientists that work on smectic and nematic singularities.
Discipline scientifique :
Lieu de la conférence