Experimental Insight into Thermally Driven Structural Evolution and Metastable Dynamics of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Droplets
Shuting Xie, Haopeng Zhang, Lu Jiang, Hua Zhang, Peiwang Li, Aihua Zhang, Changzhu Li, Zhihong Xiao, Paolo Mariani, Pradip K Bhowmik · 2026
Read Experimental Insight into Thermally Driven Structural Evolution and Metastable Dynamics of Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Droplets by Shuting Xie, Haopeng Zhang, Lu Jiang, Hua Zhang, Peiwang Li, Aihua Zhang, Changzhu Li, Zhihong Xiao, Paolo Mariani, Pradip K Bhowmik (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13610352.txt.
Description
Shuting Xie leads a ten-author team watching liquid crystal droplets melt and refreeze in microscopic detail. Cholesteric liquid crystals coil into helices that reflect light, and trapping them in uniform microfluidic droplets gives a stable radial structure of concentric rings. Heating and cooling those droplets under the microscope let the team trace every state between ordered helix and disordered liquid.
On heating past about 54 degrees, distortions appeared in the rings, then ordered domains shrank as the material turned isotropic. Cooling refused to simply rewind: first a multidomain texture formed, then a blue phase-like pattern, passing through short-lived building blocks called tactoids. Faster cooling raised nucleation density and hurried tactoid growth, while boundary elimination let large aggregates form before the droplets settled back into the stable radial structure. The authors offer the kinetics as groundwork for sensors, displays, and photonic devices built on these droplets.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Shuting Xie, Haopeng Zhang, Lu Jiang, Hua Zhang, Peiwang Li, Aihua Zhang, Changzhu Li, Zhihong Xiao, Paolo Mariani, Pradip K Bhowmik |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 29 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |