Currently I am a postdoc at ETH Zürich with a research focus on amyloid fibrils. I obtained my PhD degree in physics from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and my bachelor's from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). To know more about my research, see below
So you probably know how colloidal interactions in water may be driven by electrostatic forces or entropic depletion. In liquid crystals, however, particle shapes also matter because of how they perturb the molecular orientation field. The perturbation can propagates far beyond the physical extend of the particles and mediate particle interactions. Here we demonstrate how chirality, a measurement of shape symmetry, does that. See the details on Nat. Mater. 17, 71, 2018.
Light, especially from the sun, powers human activities in the form of food and electricity. Self-assembled monolayers of azobenzene molecules can also convert light into mechanical motion of thin microplatelets. Because of their high efficiency, those tiny motors may be started by the sunlight on a good day. See here Nat. Commun. 9, 5040, 2018.
Elastic multipoles describe interactions between colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals. Despite the discovery of elastic dipoles, quadrupoles and other higher order multipoles, the zeroth order--elastic monopoles--remained elusive for decades. Here we used polarized light to generate and switch the signs of monopoles, almost like switching the signs of electric charges. See Nature 570, 214, 2019.
*If you want the full text of any of my papers, email me and I'll send it/them to you.
Copyright © 2021 Ye Yuan - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy Website Builder