Random Walk in Soft Matter

In this talk, I will walk you through a set of unrelated (or random) questions in soft matter that we have worked on in the last few years. Brownian motion as a fundamental process of diffusion is ubiquitous in almost all physical, chemistry and biological processes. In the first part, I will show you how and why Brownian motion of low symmetry particles like boomerangs are surprisingly different from that of high symmetry particles such as spheres and ellipsoids. In the second part, I will show you a versatile technique that we developed recently to control liquid crystal molecular orientations into spatially non-uniform patterns by using engineered plasmonic metamasks. Metamasks, unlike traditional photomasks which generate patterns of light intensity, generate patterns of both light intensity and polarization directions. I will highlight some exemplary emerging applications of liquid crystals enabled by this technique.