Researchers Develop "Smart Fluid" That Reconfigures With Temperature

The new nematic liquid crystal microcolloids could enable reconfigurable optical components and photonic chips.

Published on Feb. 20, 2026

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Researchers have developed a new type of "smart fluid" called nematic liquid crystal microcolloids that can reorganize its internal structure just by changing temperature. The key was creating porous, rod-shaped silica microrods with a "slippery" surface treatment that can form dense dispersions that remain fluid-like while reorganizing with temperature changes. This allows the material to support low-symmetry liquid crystal phases with multiple distinguished alignment directions, rather than being limited to a single nematic grain direction.

Why it matters

Materials like this could one day support reconfigurable optical components, potentially changing how screens control light, how photonic chips process information, or how biomedical sensors detect and report conditions. The low-symmetry liquid crystal phases found in these nematic liquid crystal colloids could also serve as model systems for studying topological solitons and singular defects, offering insights that reach beyond soft matter to fields like magnetism, superconductors, and particle physics.

The details

The researchers developed porous, rod-shaped silica microrods about 2-3 μm long and 200-300 nm in diameter, with a perfluorocarbon coating to make the surface "slippery." When dispersed in a common nematic liquid crystal called 5CB, these microrods exhibit reduced effective surface anchoring, meaning the liquid crystal molecules at the surface can more easily deviate from the preferred orientation. This helps the rods remain dispersed and mobile rather than irreversibly aggregating. As temperature changes, the rods reorient, and in dense samples the suspension switches between distinct low-symmetry liquid crystal phases with more than one distinguished direction of alignment.

  • The study was published in the journal Matter in February 2026.

The players

Ivan Smalyukh

Director of Hiroshima University's International Institute for Sustainability with Knotted Chiral Meta Matter (WPI-SKCM²) satellite at the University of Colorado Boulder and Professor of Physics at CU Boulder.

Souvik Ghosh

The study's first author, who was a research associate at CU Boulder at the time of the work.

Lech Longa

Professor of Theoretical Physics at Jagiellonian University and WPI-SKCM² Community Member.

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What they’re saying

“Materials like this could one day support reconfigurable optical components, potentially changing how screens control light, how photonic chips process information, or how biomedical sensors detect and report conditions.”

— Ivan Smalyukh (Mirage News)

“Low-symmetry liquid crystals are difficult to achieve.”

— Ivan Smalyukh (Mirage News)

What’s next

The researchers plan to further explore the potential of these nematic liquid crystal microcolloids for applications in reconfigurable optical components, photonic chips, and biomedical sensors.

The takeaway

This new class of "smart fluid" demonstrates how materials with engineered internal structures, rather than just chemical composition, can exhibit complex and reconfigurable behaviors that could enable novel technologies and serve as model systems for fundamental physics research.