Describing temporal evolution of soft matter systems with methods of topological structural heterogeneity
In 2017 during laboratory work, researchers at the Warsaw University of Technology for the first time observed a photonic structure in nematic liquid crystals dispersed with nanoparticles of gold. The observation led to the publication of research findings in 2019 in ACS Nano - the upper decile journal. The scientists did not stop their work and continued their research as part of the implementation of the research grant awarded in the FOTECH-1 competition. An article just published in Communications Materials (Nature group) describes this work.
The structure of topological characteristics of soft matter systems.
The main outcome of the conducted research is devising a permanent framework based on homology to quantitively define the structural changes experienced by a soft matter system during a thermodynamic process.
According to the aforementioned publication, in the context of liquid crystals, the outcomes achieved by WUT researchers shed new light on the Landau-de Gennes theory of phase transitions between nematic and isotropic phases and prove that a permanent homology is a powerful tool for describing complex phase dynamics of non-heterogenous soft materials.
Details of the research are available in the publication on nature.com.
