Manipulation of soft matter, especially at micro and nanoscale, is of primary importance in many fields of science and technology. Novel scenarios have been opened in recent years by using platforms based on LiNbO3 crystals. Interestingly, the multifaced intrinsic properties of such ferroelectric crystal has driven the development of novel concepts in exploiting pyroelectric or photorefractive...
Non-centrosymmetric ferroelectric materials serve as optimal substrates for generating local evanescent electric fields for droplet manipulation. Upon illumination, net space charge distributions are induced in the material, acting as virtual electrodes for dielectrophoretic control of droplets. Droplet manipulation using this method is promising due to the high flexibility offered by optical...
Lately, evanescent electric fields generated by the bulk photovoltaic (PV) effect and the pyroelectric (PY) effect have attracted significant interest for multiple applications (particle/droplet manipulation and trapping, droplet dispensing, electrowetting, orientation of liquid crystals, etc). In this context the ferroelectric surface plays a key role, and we have discovered a new interaction...
We present a study on the electrostatic behavior of ferroelectric liquid droplets exposed to the pyroelectric field of a lithium niobate ferroelectric crystal substrate. The ferroelectric liquid is a nematic liquid crystal in which almost complete polar ordering of the molecular dipoles generates an internal macroscopic polarization locally collinear to the mean molecular long axis. Upon...
The recent discovery of nematic liquid crystal molecules showing a ferroelectric order has marked a breakthrough in liquid crystal science. In nematic liquid crystals the rodlike molecules align parallel to each other. However, the conventional nematic phase is not polar, as in average half of the molecules have their dipoles pointing in each of the two opposite directions associated to the...
