ILCS

Young-Ki Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. He obtained his B. Sc. degree in Department of Physics at Korea University (2007), and M. Eng. degree in Information Display Engineering at Hanyang University (2009). In 2009, he started his Ph. D. in Liquid Crystal Institute and Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program at Kent State University (USA). During his Ph. D., he has studied the physics of liquid crystals and concentrated on a liquid crystal characterization both in thermotropic and lyotropic system under the supervision of Dr. Oleg. D. Lavrentovich. His list of publications are available in the links as follows :

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ckbF9WUAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Young-Ki_Kim2/contributions

E-mail : ykim14@kent.edu

The texture shows a nematic tactoid (yellow regions) formed in isotropic background (black regions) during the phase transition from isotopic to nematic phase in the lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal, disodium cromoglycate; the width of figure is about 45 microns. The image is taken by LC PolScope that allow one to map the optical retardance as a function of in-plane coordinate. The color indicate the value of retardance; yellow has a higher retardance than black. The greater details and more beautiful figures are available in J. Phys.: Condens. Matter, 25, 404202 (2013).

Jury comment: What a great picture to fall in love with chromonics.