15th European liquid crystal conference 2019 in Wrocław

Abstract

The 15th European Conference on Liquid Crystals took place in a lovely town of Wrocław from June 30 till 5 July 2019 (Figure 1). This traditional Conference dates back to 1991 and serves as a forum for the dissemination of ideas in the interdisciplinary field of liquid crystals and soft anisotropic materials. This year, the Conference was chaired by Professor Marzena Tykarska from the Military University of Technology with professor Wiktor Piecek and professor Przemysław Kula as co-chairmen. It was a very successful Meeting, indeed. More than two hundred participants from 31 countries attended and contributed to the program with their presentations, lectures and posters (Figure 2). With five plenary talks and fifteen invited talks, the program was most engaging. It covered a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary areas from the synthesis of liquid crystals to optical and photonic properties and applications in industry, biology, and medicine. The first day followed by the Opening ceremony, Małgosia Kaczmarek from the University of Southampton started the first session delivering a talk on smart, hybrid liquid crystal devices. A very inspiring report explored emerging device technologies for nanoelectromechanical systems with liquid crystals. Application of semiconductors and photo-switchable liquid crystals opens the door to great opportunities to design multifunctional hybrid devices such as self-activated modulators as demonstrated in the presentation. The first session continued on physical properties, including elasto-caloric effect in LC elastomers, complex dynamics in the electro-convection in Hall 1. In the lecture Hall 2, the optical properties of liquid crystals were discussed. In particular, starting with the report on novel optical properties of LC/polymer films (Timothy Bunning), the session continued with the reports on the photo-induced anchoring transitions in cholesteric microdroplets (Sergey Shvetsov). The second session started with an inspiring talk by Victor Reshetnyak on tuning Tamm plasmons using cholesteric liquid crystals electro-optical and flexoelectricoptical effects, fast-response electro-plasmonics and complex re-orientation of the LC during photoalignment. Among the highlights of the evening session, were the presentations by Evaggelia Zavvou on the dielectric properties relationships in the nematic phases of cyano-biphenyl dimers, a talk by Nándor Éber on light-tunable gratings based on flexoelectric effect and a presentation by Alessandro Pianelli ‘Visualization and characterisation of the switching process in dye-doped dual-frequency nematic mixtures’. In the evening many participants attended two interesting tutorial lectures delivered by experienced scientists. The first tutorial presented by Mikhail Osipov was devoted to the molecular theory of liquid crystal ordering in rod-coil diblock copolymers. The next tutorial presented by Slobodan Žumer was about the topological soft matter, which leads from confined and colloidal nematics to blue phases. The second day of the Conference was devoted to chirality and polarity in various liquid crystalline systems. It started with the plenary talk by Frank Gießelmann on new aspects of chirality in lyotropic crystals where various chiral structures were demonstrated in confined lyotropic nematics. The role of chirality in determining the character of the topological defects was particularly impressive. Slobodan Žumer gave a detailed overview ‘Half-skyrmion lattices in blue phases confined to thin layers by uniform and patterned surfaces’ and Samo Kralj on topological defects in nematic liquid crystals. Maria Helena Godinho demonstrated an exciting aspect of actuating chirality via humidity in her talk ‘Twist-bend cellulose-based ribbons’. Michal Kohout presented in his talk how important are enantiomeric impurities on the physical properties of chiral liquid crystals. Twist-bend nematic phase is another hot topic on the current chiral-LC research. Christopher Blanc discussed the relation between anchoring conditions and the periodic striped pattern observed in the twist-bend nematic phase. The invited talk by Antal Jákli stood out for its unusual combination of ionic conductivity and elastomeric matrix. Tony demonstrated how the presence of ionic liquids in an LC elastomer results in a low voltage driven bending of elastomeric beams. The luminescent properties of the liquid crystals were presented by José Luis Serrano in his talk ‘Semiconductor and luminescent materials based on supramolecular liquid crystal organisations’. Wednesday appeared to be one of the busiest days of the Conference. It started with a stimulating scientific program followed by exciting excursions and the conference LIQUID CRYSTALS TODAY 2019, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 70–73 https://doi.org/10.1080/1358314X.2019.1693094