Liquid crystals, the state of matter that makes possible the
flat screen technology now commonly used in televisions and
computers, may have some new technological tricks in store.
Writing today (May 3, 2012) in the journal Nature, an
international team of researchers led by University of
Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Chemical and Biological
Engineering Juan J. de Pablo reports the results of a
computational study that shows liquid crystals, manipulated at
the smallest scale, can unexpectedly induce the molecules they
interact with to self-organize in ways that could lead to
entirely new classes of materials with new properties. "From an
applied perspective, once we get to very small scales, it
becomes incredibly difficult to pattern the structure of
materials. But here we show it is possible to use liquid
crystals to spontaneously create nanoscale morphologies we
didn't know existed," says de Pablo of computer simulations that
portray liquid crystals self-organizing at the molecular scale
in ways that could