Applied physics. Colloid science collides with liquid crystals

Dynamic Analysis of a Particle Motion System

This paper formulates a new particle motion system. The dynamic behaviors of the system are studied including the continuous dependence on initial conditions of the system’s solution, the equilibrium stability, Hopf bifurcation at the equilibrium point, etc. This shows the rich dynamic behaviors of the system, including the supercritical Hopf bifurcations, subcritical Hopf bifurcations, and chaotic attractors. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify theoretical analyses and to exhibit the rich dynamic behaviors.

Optical manipulation of the nematic director field around microspheres covered with an azo-dendrimer monolayer

We report here the optical manipulation of the director and topological defect structures of nematic liquid crystals around a silica microparticle with azobenzene-containing dendrimers (azo-dendrimers) on its surface. We successfully demonstrate the successive switching processes from hedgehog, to boojum, and further to Saturn ring configurations by ultraviolet (UV) light irradiation and termination. The switching time between these defect structures depends on the UV light intensity and attains about 50 ms. Since the pretreatment of microparticles is not necessary and the surface modification is spontaneously performed just by dissolving the azo-dendrimers in liquid crystals, this dendrimer supplies us with a variety of possible applications.