Humankind has been obsessed with knots in religion, culture and daily life for millennia,
while physicists like Gauss, Kelvin and Maxwell already involved them in models centuries …

Thermotropic liquid crystals can be formed by various molecular shapes, some discovered
over 125 years ago. The simplest and most-studied liquid crystals are made of rod-shaped …

The ability to generate regular spatial arrangements of particles is an important
technological and fundamental aspect of colloidal science. We showed that colloidal …

This pedagogical overview of liquid crystals is based on lectures for postgraduate students
given at the International Max Planck Research School “Modeling of Soft Matter”. I am …

The organization of nanoparticles in constrained geometries is an area of fundamental and
practical importance. Spherical confinement of nanocolloids leads to new modes of packing …

We demonstrate the bulk self-alignment of dispersed gold nanorods imposed by the intrinsic
cylindrical micelle self-assembly in nematic and hexagonal liquid crystalline phases of …

Control of structures in soft materials with long-range order forms the basis for applications
such as displays, liquid-crystal biosensors, tunable lenses, distributed feedback lasers …

Robust control over the positions, orientations, and assembly of nonspherical colloids may
aid in the creation of new types of structured composite materials that are important from …

Widely known for their uses in displays and electro-optics, liquid crystals are more than just
technological marvels. They vividly reveal the topology and structure of various solitonic and …

Topology has long been considered as an abstract mathematical discipline with little
connection to material science. Here we demonstrate that control over spatial and temporal …