Defect-Mediated Assembly of Liquid Crystal Elastomer Nanocomposites*

One holy grail in making polymer nanocomposites is to be able to place the filling particles into designable positions or orientations. In this talk, we will present a new strategy to self-assemble liquid crystal elastomer nanocomposites by employing topological defects in liquid crystals. We show that topological defects with pre-designed shapes and topology can be created by using a photopatterning technique to control the molecular orientations at the boundaries. Nanoparticles dispersed in the liquid crystals are attracted and self-assembled to these topological defects to minimize the elastic energy of the system. With carefully designed molecular orientations, we show the self-assembly of the nanoparticles into loops and web-networks in liquid crystal polymers.