Peicheng Xu, featured ILCC liquid crystal artist, October 2018

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Peicheng Xu is a Ph.D. candidate from Optoelectronics Group at the University of Cambridge. He is working on the surface modification of clay particles for the purpose of both accessing their liquid crystalline discotic phase and further building transparent and mechanically resilient coatings with 3D ‘brick-and-mortar’ structure that is similar to that observed in natural mother of pearl.

His webpage: www.oe.phy.cam.ac.uk
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This picture is taken from the birefringent hydrogel with a lamellar structure. This sample is composed of disc-like clay-particles (Laponite) with a positively charged rim, in the presence of the small, barrel-shaped molecule cucurbit[7]uril (CB[7]). More information can be found from our recently published paper: P. Xu, Y. Lan, L. Dai, T. O’Neill, I. Stoev and E. Eiser Discotic ’liquid crystals of cucurbit[7]uril-functionalized Laponite clays’ J. Mol. Phys., accepted (2018).
Jury comment:
The image is dynamically composed and shows a nice combination of colours.