Martin Kühnast and Hsin-Ling Liang, Ph.D. students from Germany (Hsin-Ling is originally from Taiwan) at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and University of Mainz, respectively, are visiting the SNM and LC Nano labs in February. Hsin-Ling will work together with JungHyun Noh on liquid crystal shell production and analysis and Martin will work primarily on carbon nanotubes in thermotropic liquid crystals, largely in collaboration with the LC Nano lab of Prof. Giusy Scalia.

Tags: visitors, Group

Finally, after months of down-time due to our previous provider, which became totally unreliable and unresponsive, www.lcsoftmatter.com is again working. We have a new provider and everything now seems to run smoothly. Sadly, the downtime affected not only the web site but from time to time also the e-mail. Thus, if you have been trying to contact Jan and never got a response, this may have been the reason.

Following up on our optical characterization of electrospun fibers containing cholesteric liquid crystals we have now published a paper describing a nanoscale characterization of the same type of fibers by scanning electron microscopy, correlated with polarizing optical microscopy investigations. The study, which was carried out in collaboration with Prof. Giusy Scalia and co-workers (LC Nano lab), compares fibers prepared with slightly varying sheath solution compositions. We find large variations of external morphology as well as the degree and character of liquid crystal filling, depending on the exact spinning conditions and composition of the sheath solution. You can download the paper, published in Macromolecular Materials & Engineering, here.

Tags: publications