Most people know liquid crystals (LCs) from their displays, but they are actually a fascinating state of matter – fluid like a liquid, yet ordered like a crystal. When bringing nanoscience into the picture, LCs become much more than display materials. A review in Advanced Nanocomposites offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the rapidly evolving intersection between LCs and nanoscience. The authors present how the marriage of these two fields is not just an incremental advance, but a paradigm shift, enabling the design of advanced multifunctional, programmable, and reconfigurable materials.
The review provides new insights into the opportunities and challenges presented by these advanced functional architectures. The authors believe it offers a vital resource for researchers and serves as a roadmap for future innovations in physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and engineering.
"LCs can serve as a programmable 'canvas' that guides nanoparticles – gold, graphene, MXene – to self‑assemble in precise ways,” explains lead and corresponding author Jian Sun, a researcher in Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Biomedical Materials at Wenzhou Institute, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Those nanoparticles, in return, give LCs entirely new abilities: photothermal response, color switching, encryption, even muscle‑like movement. It’s a true synergy, and it opens the door to a new generation of smart, reconfigurable materials.
The review focused on three areas.
“Additionally, we highlighted how functional nanomaterials enable tunable structural color in chiral LCEs for advanced anti-counterfeiting, adaptive camouflage, and dynamic information encryption,” adds Sun.
Nonetheless, the researchers summarized three major hurdles in achieving:
###
Contact author details:
Jian Sun, Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Biomedical Materials, Wenzhou Institute, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China, jiansun@ucas.ac.cn ;
Lanying Zhang, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China, zhanglanying@pku.edu.cn ;
Huai Yang, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China, yanghuai@pku.edu.cn
The publisher KeAi was established by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd to unfold quality research globally. In 2013, our focus shifted to open access publishing. We now proudly publish more than 200 world-class, open access, English language journals, spanning all scientific disciplines. Many of these are titles we publish in partnership with prestigious societies and academic institutions, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Advanced Nanocomposites
Literature review
Not applicable
Recent advances in functional liquid crystals with nanomaterials
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.