The International Liquid Crystal Society (ILCS) was founded in 1990 and currently has over 900 members in 43 countries worldwide. [1] The ILCS was conceived in 1987 by Lui Lam and took three years to be founded at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, during the 13th International Liquid Crystal Conference. [2] Specifically, the ILCS was born on July 27, 1990, in Vancouver, with 22 Members. [3]
The aim of the Society is to unite scientists, engineers and students working in the broad field of fundamental and applied aspects of different liquid crystal systems, including thermotropic, lyotropic, polymer and polymer-modified liquid crystals. [1] ILCS publishes two online publications on liquid crystals, Liquid Crystals Today, [4] appearing under the sponsorship of Taylor & Francis, and archive-style electronic liquid crystal communications platform, e-lc. [5]
A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly, instead using a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome. LCDs are available to display arbitrary images or fixed images with low information content, which can be displayed or hidden, such as preset words, digits, and seven-segment displays, as in a digital clock. They use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made from a matrix of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements. LCDs can either be normally on (positive) or off (negative), depending on the polarizer arrangement. For example, a character positive LCD with a backlight will have black lettering on a background that is the color of the backlight, and a character negative LCD will have a black background with the letters being of the same color as the backlight. Optical filters are added to white on blue LCDs to give them their characteristic appearance.
Liquid crystals (LCs) are a state of matter which has properties between those of conventional liquids and those of solid crystals. For instance, a liquid crystal may flow like a liquid, but its molecules may be oriented in a crystal-like way. There are many different types of liquid-crystal phases, which can be distinguished by their different optical properties. The contrasting areas in the textures correspond to domains where the liquid-crystal molecules are oriented in different directions. Within a domain, however, the molecules are well ordered. LC materials may not always be in a liquid-crystal state of matter.
Vectran is a manufactured fiber, spun from a liquid-crystal polymer (LCP) created by Celanese Corporation and now manufactured by Kuraray. Chemically it is an aromatic polyester produced by the polycondensation of 4-hydroxybenzoic acid and 6-hydroxynaphthalene-2-carboxylic acid.
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.
The columnar phase is a class of mesophases in which molecules assemble into cylindrical structures to act as mesogens. Originally, these kinds of liquid crystals were called discotic liquid crystals or bowlic liquid crystals because the columnar structures are composed of flat-shaped discotic or bowl-shaped molecules stacked one-dimensionally. Since recent findings provide a number of columnar liquid crystals consisting of non-discoid mesogens, it is more common now to classify this state of matter and compounds with these properties as columnar liquid crystals.
Liquid-crystal polymers (LCPs) are a class of aromatic polymers. They are extremely unreactive and inert, and highly resistant to fire.
Crystal engineering is the design and synthesis of molecular solid state structures with desired properties, based on an understanding and use of intermolecular interactions. The two main strategies currently in use for crystal engineering are based on hydrogen bonding and coordination bonding. These may be understood with key concepts such as the supramolecular synthon and the secondary building unit.
CrystEngComm is a peer-reviewed online-only scientific journal publishing original research and review articles on all aspects of crystal engineering including properties, polymorphism, target materials, and crystalline nanomaterials. It is published biweekly by the Royal Society of Chemistry and the editor-in-chief is Andrew Shore. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2018 impact factor of 3.382, ranking it second out of 23 journals in the category "Crystallography". CrystEngComm has a close association with the virtual web community, CrystEngCommunity.
Martin Schadt is a Swiss physicist and inventor.
A blue phase mode LCD is a liquid crystal display (LCD) technology that uses highly twisted cholesteric phases in a blue phase. It was first proposed in 2007 to obtain a better display of moving images with, for example, frame rates of 100–120 Hz to improve the temporal response of LCDs. This operational mode for LCDs also does not require anisotropic alignment layers and thus theoretically simplifies the LCD manufacturing process.
Dame Athene Margaret Donald is a British physicist. She is Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Cambridge, and Master of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Takuzo Aida is a polymer chemist known for his work in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, materials chemistry and polymer chemistry. Aida, who is the Deputy Director for the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, School of Engineering, at the University of Tokyo, has made pioneering contributions to the initiation, fundamental progress, and conceptual expansion of supramolecular polymerization. Aida has also been a leader and advocate for addressing critical environmental issues caused by plastic waste and microplastics in the oceans, soil, and food supply, through the development of dynamic, responsive, healable, reorganizable, and adaptive supramolecular polymers and related soft materials.
Patricia Elisabeth Cladis was a Canadian-American physicist who specialized in the physics of liquid crystals. She was a research physicist at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1972 to 1997 before founding Advanced Liquid Crystal Technologies in Summit, New Jersey. She was a fellow of the American Physical Society and also received a Guggenheim fellowship.
Helen Frances Gleeson OBE FInstP is a British physicist who specialises in soft matter and liquid crystals. She is Cavendish Professor and Head of the School of Physics at the University of Leeds.
Pierangelo Metrangolo is vicepres of IUPAC and an Italian chemist with interests in supramolecular chemistry and functional materials. He also has an interest in crystal engineering, in particular by using the halogen bond.
The Katharine Burr Blodgett Medal and Prize is a gold medal awarded annually by the Institute of Physics to "recognise contributions to the organisation or application of physics in an industrial or commercial context." The medal is accompanied by a prize of £1000.
Nelamangala Vedavyasachar Madhusudana is an Indian physicist and an emeritus scientist at Raman Research Institute. Known for his research on liquid crystals, Madhusudhana is an elected fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Science Academy. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to physical sciences in 1989.
Iain McCulloch is a Scottish academic and business executive who has done extensive research on polymer materials and their use in biological applications.
Raffaele Mezzenga is a soft condensed matter scientist, currently heading the Laboratory of Food and Soft Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Ronald G. Larson is George G. Brown Professor of Chemical Engineering and Alfred H. White Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, where he holds joint appointments in Macromolecular Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. He is internationally recognized for his research contributions to the fields of polymer physics and complex fluid rheology, especially in the development of theory and computational simulations. Notably, Larson and collaborators discovered new types of viscoelastic instabilities for polymer molecules and developed predictive theories for their flow behavior. He has written numerous scientific papers and two books on these subjects, including a 1998 textbook, “The Structure and Rheology of Complex Fluids”. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Bingham medalist and fellow of the Society of Rheology, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.