Soft Order and Topology Motives in Biomedicine, Nanoscience, Cosmology, Living Matter and Emergent Industries

The 2019 Gordon Conference on Liquid Crystals will bring together a diverse interdisciplinary community of researchers working at the frontiers of liquid crystal science and technology, broadly defined. Nowadays, the high-quality displays, non-mechanical beam steering devices, and switching elements in optical telecommunication networks can hardly be imagined without liquid crystals. The unique interaction of liquid crystals with light, and especially their response to laser beams, allows one to control their structure and opens numerous possibilities for technological applications. Liquid crystals composed of - or doped with - nano-sized particles are of a great interest for emerging new applications such as the tunable and frequency selective negative index media. The anticipated new technological developments are closely related to many interesting emerging problems in basic science of liquid crystals that attract great interest. Being at the nexus of materials science, biology, soft condensed matter physics, chemistry, optics, and photonics, the conference theme is inherently interdisciplinary.

The conference will take the form of a summit, bringing together prominent scientists as well as students and postdoctoral fellows. The speakers will be specifically asked to emphasize the open/emerging questions and unsolved problems. The focus will be on recent advances at the interface between soft condensed matter physics, biotechnology and optics that promise to open conceptually novel directions of research. Understanding the underlying physics, chemistry, and biology of systems that possess liquid crystallinity will be emphasized. The program will include talks that address these topics through experiment, theory and simulation, and it will also integrate fundamental and applied perspectives. The conference will provide ample opportunities to foster networking between students and junior researchers, to make connections with many of the leading scientists from a wide variety of fields, and to establish exciting new collaborations.