Researchers from Kent State and Hungary continue to collaborate on a project to explain a liquid crystal phenomenon that could lead to new kinds of energy-generation material, such as artificial neurons.
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals, discovered in 2017, are three-dimensional fluids that can naturally create an electric field within themselves. How this happens remains just one of the subjects of collaboration between the researchers.
Antal Jákli, a Kent State professor of physics and director of the materials science graduate program, visits Hungary every summer to work with Marcell Máthé and Peter Salamon of the Wigner Research Centre for Physics’ Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics.
Much of Jákli’s work focuses on piezoelectricity, the phenomenon where an electric charge is generated after mechanical stress is applied to a material.
“They are fluids, or liquids, in three dimensions,” Jákli said. “But when you apply an electric field, they behave like solid particles or filaments.”
He introduced the subject of the piezoelectric effect on ferroelectric materials to his collaborators in 2020. Since then, they have done a wide range of studies to understand the material and piezoelectric behavior.
“If you have a liquid, if you put it between two plates, it forms a droplet,” Jákli said. “If you start separating the plates, they will just drop down. There is an old, famous theory that you cannot make the length longer than the perimeter, but we could make bridges which were 100 times longer than the perimeter, and they were not completely stable, but we could stabilize with electric field, with voltage.
He said when they did that, they realized even water can form bridges, but it requires a thousand times larger voltage than ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals.
Máthé said many chemists have observed this effect before. Their new research focused on recording the exact conditions for the phenomenon to occur.
“The tricky part was to make a measurement to how to characterize these mods, what type of measurements you can do, and so on,” Máthé said.
They worked to capture how thick the filaments were, how they reacted when an electric field was applied to them and what happened when they heated up or cooled down, Máthé said.
Salamon said lots of unseen phenomena exist related to this phase.
“Now, I believe that we understand the mechanism behind this phenomenon,” Salamon said. “And that’s a good thing because so many people experience this effect with this filament.”
Jákli said many Kent State students worked on this project as well, and there is still more to learn about ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals.
The Advanced Materials & Liquid Crystal Institute will celebrate its 60th anniversary this spring. Jákli and his colleagues’ research advances what is already known about flat-panel liquid crystal displays and what they are capable of, which is the main focus of the institute.
“We are interested in understanding why they do what they do and how they do what they do,” Jákli said. “These [researchers] are really young, very talented people.”
Lauren Cohen is a general assignment editor. Contact her at [email protected].
