About:

Apala Majumdar and Lei Zhang co-lead a Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship on solution landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystalline systems. Nematic liquid crystals are anisotropic mesophases intermediate between conventional solid and liquid states of matter; indeed the anisotropic directional nature of nematics makes them the working material of choice for the multi-billion dollar liquid crystal display industry along with a range of other electro-optic applications, sensors, actuators and novel applications in biology and pharmacology.

This bilateral UK-China fellowship has been successful, with three project research outputs to date, and two research workshops (the first workshop in Bath in 2018 and a second workshop in Changchun, China in 2019). This fellowship has involved researchers from the University of Strathclyde, University of Oxford, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Illinois University of Technology, University of Waterloo Canada etc.

This focussed workshop brings together the project participants on a virtual platform, from the UK, China, USA and Canada. The talks covered: theoretical approaches to novel liquid-crystalline systems; numerical methods for computing complex solution landscapes, including the relatively open field of saddle point solutions; modelling of biological liquid crystalline systems; and new experiments in the field. This virtual platform allows us to consolidate our recent work and theoretical advances, propose new collaborative projects at the interface of analysis and applications and organise follow-up activities and international networks spanning three continents.