Hsin-Ling Liang, featured ILCC liquid crystal artist, March 2017

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Hsin-Ling received her BSc and MSc in the Department of Engineering and System Science from National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and her DSc from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz with a thesis on microfluidic produced LC shells, supervised by Prof. Jan Lagerwall and Prof Rudolf Zental. She carried on her research in the Photonics and Sensors Group at the University of Cambridge, where she worked on dye-doped liquid crystals and the roll-to-roll production of switchable liquid crystal panels. She then moved to the NanoManufacturing Group (Dr. Michael De Volder) exploring the roll-to-roll manufacturability of nano- and photonic materials. Contact Email: hll44(at)cam.ac.uk



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Trajectories of whirl turbulent flows created in a homeotropic aligned smectic A liquid crystal sample in an a.c. electric field (observed in crossed polarizers), a phenomenon of electrohydrodynamic convection (EHD). The loop patterns are formed by tiny focal conic domains. This flow motion can drag the pre-blended colloidal particles moving around with the convective rolls above the threshold voltage and stops momentarily on the removal of the field – see the movie.
Jury comment: Textural patterns by hydrodynamics in LCs are typical representations of the complexity of anisotropic fluids. The spirals in the image simply remind me the sky of the well-known painting “Starry Night” by Van Gogh, which is often used by physicists to demonstrate “turbulence” in fluidic systems.