Congratulations to current and former group members Elaine and Judith whose paper entitled “Multimodal control of liquid crystalline mesophases from surfactants with photoswitchable tails” has been accepted for publication in Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

This work reports a family of neutral azobenzene photosurfactants which, using small-angle X-ray scattering and polarised optical microscopy, are shown to form a variety of lyotropic liquid crystal mesophases depending on the surfactant structure and solution temperature and concentration. Photoisomerisation of the surfactant with UV light leads to the destruction of the liquid crystalline phase. This process is reversible, allowing the liquid crystalline phases to be selectively created and destroyed on-demand.

Thanks to Diamond Light Source for time on Beamline B21 to perform small-angle X-ray scattering experiments.

Multimodal control of liquid crystalline mesophases from surfactants with photoswitchable tails, J. E. Houston, E. A. Kelly, Margarita Kruteva, Kiriaki Chrissopoulou, Nathan Cowieson, R. C. Evans*, J. Mater. Chem. C, 2019, DOI: 10.1039/C9TC04079J