A beautiful study by Dae Kyom, demonstrating how capillary forces from water condensing on the outside of fibers during electrospinning can drastically influence the shape and core content of the fibers, is now published as an article in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 6, 18, 16441−16447 (2014). You can find the paper here (subscription required).

For a special issue of ChemPhysChem on the physical properties and behaviour of liquid crystals, we published a study on how the orientation and pitch of the helix in films formed by drying cholesteric liquid crystalline suspensions of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) can be controlled with high accuracy based on a few simple considerations. The first point is that tactic boundaries, always present if one starts with suspensions that are in the phase coexistence regime, randomize the orientation of the helix, thereby giving rise to the irregular mosaic texture (left) often seen when drying films from low concentration CNC suspensions. By simply raising the concentration such that the initial suspension is fully liquid crystalline, a film with uniformly standing helix and much more uniform pitch can be achieved (right). Moreover, we show that an orbital shear flow can have a good effect in orienting the helix even when tactoids cannot be avoided. The work is a collaboration with the LC Nano lab of Prof. Giusy Scalia and the group of Prof. Lennart Bergström at the Materials and Environmental Chemistry Department of Stockholm University. You can find the paper at the ChemPhysChem web site here. Unfortunately, we could not include color images in the final version of the paper, so be sure to also download the Supporting Information file, which contains all images in color version (the color is important for the discussion).

Note: if you want to learn more about liquid crystals from CNC, please check out our recent review article (open access!) in NPG Asia Materials.

Zornitza Tosheva joins the Experimental Soft Matter Physics group as a Research Associate. Zory was previously investigating radon in different water sources and will now change to study liquid crystals and colloids.

At the 2014 German Liquid Crystal Conference in Magdeburg Jan was invited to deliver the honorary Vorländervorlesung. The title of his presentation, which contained some quite general reflections about our current research situation, was "With an open attitude, new doors open".

Since March 1st 2014 the “Soft Nano- and Microstructures Group” at Seoul National University ceased to exist and it is replaced by the “Experimental Soft Matter Physics” group at the University of Luxembourg, where Jan since this date is full professor in physics, at the Physics & Materials Science Research Unit. This web site will eventually be updated to reflect the new situation and the changes it will entail. Our current main research foci (on functional composite fibers produced by electrospinning; on liquid crystalline shells [low molar mass and elastomeric]; and on liquid crystalline self-assembly of cellulose nanocrystals) will remain and we are still very interested in transdisciplinary research, although there will be an increased focus on physics with more room for fundamental research than what the situation in Korea allowed.