I was invited by University of Nova Gorica to give a talk within the series of presentations entitled "Znanstveni večeri". The lecture was devoted to photonics and optical telecommunications. Nowadays, the ever increasing information traffic on the web has resulted in insufficient capacity of the world's optical network using present state-of-the-art optical communication solutions. Ideas and concepts that would allow for an all-optical control of optical communications are discussed. It was shown, that liquid crystals could provide unusual but elegent solution to this problem.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 24547879General properties and recent developments in the field of nematic colloids and emulsions are discussed. The origin and nature of pair colloidal interactions in the nematic colloids are explained and an overview of stable colloidal 2D crystalline structures and superstructures, discovered so far, is given. The nature and role of topological defects in the nematic colloids is discussed, with an emphasis on recently discovered entangled colloidal structures. Applications of inverted nematic emulsions and binding force mechanisms in nematic colloids for soft matter photonic devices are discussed. This paper was presented as an invited talk at "International Symposium on Non-Equilibrium Soft Matter 2010" held in August 2010 in Nara, Japan.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 24853031In this article for the general readership of Slovenian daily newspaper Delo, we present knots and links, discovered by us in chiral nematic colloids. We introduce basic physics of liquid crystals, explaining the concepts of colloidal entanglement in liquid crystal colloids that eventualy result in knotted and linked colloids. The article describes findings, published in our article on knots and links in chiral nematic colloids, published on July 1, 2011, in Science.
F.02 Acquisition of new scientific knowledge
COBISS.SI-ID: 25177383