Self-Assembly in Liquid Crystalline Materials

Dear Colleagues,

Self-assembly is ubiquitous in nature, and biosystems are destined to have their own biological functions through the spontaneous assembly of molecular building blocks. Studying self-assembly will not only help us to gain a better understanding of the biological world but also shed light on designing and controlling building blocks such as DNA, fatty acid, and peptides to self-assemble into desired superstructures for bionanomaterial applications. These have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years to study self-assembly behavior in liquid crystalline materials. Thus, a whole new realm of phenomena and physics have been discovered, such as active nematics of self-assembly of non-equilibrium biological entities, programable liquid crystalline elastomers, directed micro/nanoparticles in various liquid crystalline materials, etc. It is expected that in the near future, research in self-assembly in liquid crystalline materials will find broad applications in material science, biology, and medicine.

We invite colleagues to submit papers exploring the different aspects of self-assembly in liquid crystalline materials. The potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Directed self-assembly in liquid crystalline materials;
• Out-of-equilibrium active nematics;
• Microfabrication;
• Liquid crystalline composites;
• Multifunctional material applications;
• Programmable liquid crystal elastomers;
• Dynamics in liquid crystals
• Novel liquid crystal phases (e.g. twist-bend nematic, ferroelectric nematic, etc.)

Prof. Dr. Chenhui Peng
Prof. Dr. Dmitry A. Bedrov
Prof. Dr. Shuang Zhou
Guest Editors

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