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.

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.