Soft Matter World
   

Soft Matter World News

All the latest news and announcements for the world of soft matter. Click on a headline below for more information:

 

University of Colorado at Boulder announces Workshop on Light-Controlled Liquid Crystalline Complex Adaptive Materials

The workshop will take place from 7 -10 August, 2008 at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Conference chairs are Noel Clark and Ivan Smalyukh.

The Boulder LC2CAM International Workshop will enable researchers working at the forefronts of materials science and optics to discuss theemerging uses of light for control of ordered soft materials and advances in the use of liquid crystals to control light.

Workshop topics include:
  • Laser trapping and manipulation in liquid crystals
  • Tunable and frequency-selective negative-index media
  • Light-induced phase transitions
  • Nonlinear optics of liquid crystals
  • Light-controlled surface anchoring phenomena
  • Confocal, multiphoton fluorescence, and CARS microscopy of liquidcrystals
  • Holographic polymer dispersed liquid crystals
  • Light-controlled liquid crystalline polymers and elastomers
  • Optics of colloidal and nanostructured systems
  • Sensors and wavefront control devices

Important Dates:

  • 1st call for papers February 5, 2008
  • Final call for papers June 1, 2008
  • Fellowship application deadline June 5, 2008
  • Abstract deadline July 15, 2008
  • Publication of program August 1, 2008

The Boulder LC2CAM Workshop will bring together both prominent and junior scientists. Participation of students & postdoctoral fellows is strongly encouraged, and up to 20 fellowships will be awarded tosupport travel of early-career scientists, minority students, and faculty at minority serving institutions. The presentations will be webcasted in real time and, in addition to the on-site audience, registered participants around the World will have an opportunity to ask questions.

The workshop has no registration fees. The meeting website is at http://i2cam.org/conference/lc2cam08/

back to top

 

North East soft matter school to be held at UMass this summer.

This summer (2008) the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will host a summer school entitled "Soft Solids and Complex Fluids".

This year's school will run from Sunday, June 1st through Thursday June 5th. The school is targeted at 2nd or 3rd year graduate students, early in their research careers in soft-matter physics, statistical physics, and other closely related areas.

Each year, the school will typically be composed of four modular courses that teach the foundations of topics that are not regularly included in most graduate physics curricula, but which are relevant to modern research in the area of soft solids and complex fluids.

This year’s lecturers and topics of instruction are:

  • Paul Goldbart (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Soft random solids: Their structure and elasticity
  • Robert Pelcovits (Brown University): Liquid crystal physics
  • Eric Lauga (UC San Diego): Low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics
  • Tony Dinsmore (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): Physics of colloids

Graduate students may apply through the website: http://courses.umass.edu/ssphys/

Expenses for students (which include lodging, breakfast, lunch and afternoon refreshments) will total approximately $300 for the five days. More details about the program and format of the school are available at the website.

back to top

 

International Liquid Crystal Society launches online publication.

e-LC, or electronic Liquid Crystal Communications is an on-line interactive document server created in response to the need for rapid dissemination of important research results in the field of liquid crystals and soft matter.

Created in 2002 and housed in the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, e-LC is unusual among electronic publications in a number of respects. Its mission is two-fold: to allow rapid electronic access to high quality research results by posting peer-assessed documents online; and to provide a platform where questions and comments regarding documents can be posted.

Publication in e-LC is rapid; documents, submitted in pdf format, are sent out the associate editors who assess the suitability of publication in e-LC . Documents are either accepted as is, or rejected without explanation; accepted documents are online within seven days of submission.

Publication in e-LC does not preclude publication in regular journals. e-LC has negotiated agreements journals such as Physical Review, Nature, Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals, European Physical Journal E, etc. according to which documents published in e-LC may subsequently be published in these regular journals. The process of negotiation with scientific journals is ongoing.

Accepted documents, posted on e-LC, are time-stamped to establish priority. They are also stamped with a watermark identifying publication in e-LC. Publication in e-LC is free; documents published in e-LC are also freely available to everyone with web access. Documents may read online or downloaded. The number of hits on the abstract and on the full text of each document is recorded and displayed on line to indicate interest in the document. In addition, comments on individual documents may be posted on line; these are forwarded to the corresponding author, who may, in turn, respond online. Interestingly, this feature of e-LC is not as popular as might be expected.

Over 60 papers have been published on e-LC to date; many with thousands of hits on the full document. In light of the popularity of e-LC, it was expanded in 2006 to include Ph.D. dissertations, and in 2007, to include pdf versions of power-point oral presentations at seminars and conferences. Presently there are about 50 presentations posted, which can be browsed by the event or aurthors name.

e-LC is accessible at: e-LC.org.

back to top

 
 
         

All content © 2007 Soft Matter World. Contact +1 (850) 644-7009
Comments and broken links should be addressed to webmaster@softmatterworld.org

International Center for Materials Research National Science Foundation