Hui-Yu Chen and Kuan-Cheng Su, featured ILCS liquid crystal artists, March 2023

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Hui-Yu Chen

Prof. Hui-Yu Chen has worked at the Department of Physics, National Chung Hsing University (Taiwan) since 2013. From 2006 to 2007, she worked in the Prof. Noel Clark's group, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA and focused on the Sematic A LC and other interesting LC phases. After she got her PhD degree in Applied Physics, Chung Yuan Christian University (Taiwan) in 2007, she became an assistant prof. at the Department of Photonics, Feng Chia University (Taiwan). Her lab.-Liquid Crystal Material Research Lab.-focused on the physical properties and field-induced optical response on LCs with chirality.
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Kuan-Cheng Su

It’s his second year of master degree and woking on Prof. Hui-Yu Chen’s group, at department of Physics, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan. Surveying the structure of dimer liquid crystal can always surprise him. Hope that he could share more interesting picture with us in the future.
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We put the cell between two crossed polarizers and took the picture by smartphone. It shows a macroscopic LC ribbon. The LC material, we used here is a mixture of dimer LC/nematic LC doped with chiral dopant and it is filled into a cell made by two clean glasses (without surface treatment). We heated the cell to isotropic phase and then put it into the refrigerator, where the temperature was around 10℃. The LC phase is the twist-bend chiral nematic phase. Small circular patterns with four black brushes can be seen in the beginning, and then they turn to layer structures with beautiful colors—the color shifts to a short wavelength at a higher temperature.
Jury comment: The photo, that it corresponds to the mesophase shown by very attractive materials, shows how liquid crystals combine science and artistic aspects, so the picture is very attractive from an aesthetic and artistic point of view.