Our group has the privilege of studying a truly exciting and beautiful class of substances, liquid crystals.

While liquid crystals were discovered about one hundred years ago they began to attract great interest in the 1970's with the realization that their unique optical properties might be used in a number of industrial applications. In particular, if you are reading this on a laptop computer, you are staring at a thin layer of liquid crystals.

As the name suggests, liquid crystals collect the properties of both liquids and solids. Likewise, the study of liquid crystals draws together practitioners of a number of different disciplines, most notably physicists, chemists, and chemical engineers. As physicists, we are particularly interested in modeling and understanding how the basic interactions between these long thin molecules affect their aggregate behavior.

Under the direction of Physics Professor Cheng Cher Huang, the liquid crystal group at the University of Minnesota has, over the last 20 years, developed a number of probes for studying liquid crystals. While our work initially focussed on high precision measurements of the heat capacity of both bulk and later free standing thin film samples, we have recently been investigating the optical reflectivity and surface tension.

Please click here for a brief history and introduction to Liquid Crystals.