Md Mostafa, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, January 2024. Md Mostafa is a Ph.D. candidate (Materials Science) in Dr. Antal Jákli and Dr. John West's group at Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Ohio, USA. His research focuses on Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals (PDLCs) for applications in optical devices, shear sensing, thermochromic textiles, etc. He recently completed a Research Scientist Internship at Meta, where he collaborated with the "Optics and Display Research" team to improve augmented and virtual reality device performance. Contact:mmostafa@kent.edu

Paresh Kumar Behera, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, February 2024. The mesmerizing liquid crystalline structure, anchored in triphenylene, reveals an enchanting columnar hexagonal phase. As we delicately cooled the isotropic liquid, a captivating burst of color emerged around 140°C. Our Nikon digital camera, coupled with a 10x magnification Nikon microscope, skillfully captured this chromatic masterpiece. The resulting image mirrors a captivating self-assembled system, where the interplay of colors, contrasts, and shapes artistically unveils the inherent beauty encapsulated within the realm of liquid crystal science. Contact:pareshkumarbehera12345@gmail.com

Priyanka Kumari, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, March 2024. 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. Contact:pkumari1@kent.edu

Ingo Dierking, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, April 2024. Texture of a ferroelectric Smectic C* phase at zero Volt after electric field application with reforming helical superstructure. (The longer edge of the image is 700 micrometre in length). Cell thickness is 10 micrometre, temperature 97 degrees Celsius, between crossed polarisers. The image appears to resemble that of a desert-like agricultural area viewed from great height. Contact:ingo.dierking@manchester.ac.uk

YunJie-Wang, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, May 2024. The sample of liquid-crystal droplets are prepared by nematic liquid crystal and PVA aqueous solution. The sample is filled into clean glass slide and coverslip. We add 0.0025g LC into 0.49875g PVA aqueous solution and then centrifuge for five seconds. Subsequently, the solution is ultrasonicated at room temperature for 5 min. The picture is a transmittance photo taken by optical microscope, and the objective lens is 20X. Contact: https://www.lcmrlintw.nchu.edu.tw/

Rebecca Walker, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, June 2024. This beautiful texture is observed when viewing a ferroelectric nematogen (EC437) under the polarised optical microscope, in a thin cell with homeotropic anchoring at 85 C. Disclination lines appear to spread out from a central point in an almost focal-conic manner, not unlike the petals of a flower! The POM image of the ferroelectric nematic phase (NF) was taken on a Zeiss AxioImager A2m equipped with a Linkam THMS600 hot stage, 20x magnification, in a homeotropically aligned cell of thickness 1.7 micron (purchased from Warsaw Military University of Technology). Contact:rebecca.walker@abdn.ac.uk

Kamal Thapa, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, July 2024. Defects such as dislocations are ubiquitous in condensed matter physics. The picture represents the splitting of a thick edge dislocation with Burgers vector full pitch into two thin edge dislocations with Burgers vector half pitch on heating the sample from antiferroelectric chiral smectic to paraelectric cholesteric phase. The photo is taken using a polarizing optical microscope (Nikon OPTIPHOT2- POL equipped with an objective: M Plan , N.A. 0.14, Nikon Instruments Inc.) under crossed polarizers in an antiparallel buffed wedge cell at cholesteric phase, 100 C. The wedge cell is filled with a chiral mixture DIO:R1011 = 99.8:0.2 (wt.%), where DIO is a ferroelectric nematic material and R1011 is a chiral additive. Contact:kthapa@kent.edu

Ashley Zelina, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, August 2024. The image was captured while Ashley was studying disodium chromoglycate tactoids. The solution was transitioning from the isotropic/nematic region (where the tactoids form) to the isotropic region, and they just so happened to form this beautiful ring! Contact:azelina1@kent.edu

Roxana Ackermann, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, September 2024. The photograph shows the effect of sinusoidal electric fields in a chiral ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal with a pitch of the order of several microns, offering a glimpse into the beauty that lies at the intersection of science and art. The width of the photograph corresponds to approximately 1077 microns. Contact:roxana.ackermann@t-online.de

Lawrence (Larry) Honaker, featured ILCS liquid crystal artist, October 2024. We prepared droplets of a red-reflecting cholesteric liquid crystal mixture, suspended in a PVA solution (to generate tangential anchoring), and then exposed them to an analyte (here, the surfactant SDS). As a result, you get to see a mixture unswitched (Frank-Pryce), switching ("blue fog"), and switched (fingerprint) droplets all at the same time. Contact:lhonaker@kent.edu

Dark Odyssey. ©Shamima Akhter. November 2024. We have synthesized a new series of hybrid materials called clustomesogens. These materials consist of liquid crystalline hybrid nanomaterials that contain functional metal nanoclusters combined with liquid crystalline ammonium cations. Under polarized optical microscopy (POM), this material exhibits a nematic liquid crystal phase. Contacthttps://www.kent.edu/amlci/marianne-prevot-0