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Research University - Warsaw University of Technology

Describing temporal evolution of soft matter systems with methods of topological structural heterogeneity

In 2017 during laboratory work, researchers at the Warsaw University of Technology for the first time observed a photonic structure in nematic liquid crystals dispersed with nanoparticles of gold. The observation led to the publication of research findings in 2019 in ACS Nano - the upper decile journal. The scientists did not stop their work and continued their research as part of the implementation of the research grant awarded in the FOTECH-1 competition. An article just published in Communications Materials (Nature group) describes this work. 

The structure of topological characteristics of soft matter systems.

The structure of topological characteristics of soft matter systems.

The main outcome of the conducted research is devising a permanent framework based on homology to quantitively define the structural changes experienced by a soft matter system during a thermodynamic process.

According to the aforementioned publication, in the context of liquid crystals, the outcomes achieved by WUT researchers shed new light on the Landau-de Gennes theory of phase transitions between nematic and isotropic phases and prove that a permanent homology is a powerful tool for describing complex phase dynamics of non-heterogenous soft materials.

Details of the research are available in the publication on nature.com.