Priyanka Kumari, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, March 2024

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Priyanka Kumari is a 3rd year Ph.D. student, working with Dr. Oleg D. Lavrentovich (Lavrentovich research group), at Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA. Her research includes investigating the defects, domains, and domain walls in the ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals. She is particularly interested in exploring the effect of surface interactions on the macroscopic structure and topological defects in the ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals.

Research Group website: http://www.lavrentovichgroup.com/research.html
Email: pkumari1(at)kent.edu
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The picture represents that domain walls in the absence of bulk and surface aligning axes adopt the shape of conic sections such as parabola and hyperbola. The conics bisect the angle between two neighboring polarization fields to avoid electric charges. This is a polarizing optical microscopy image of a film of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal, DIO, onto the surface of glycerin, film thickness ≈ 6 µm, temperature T = 60 °C.
You may also include the link the link https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36326-1 which has a detailed discussion on the selected texture.
Jury comment: The equilibrated combination of colors and shadows together with the texture introduced by the defects aesthetically portrays the beauty of the science of liquid crystals.