In collaboration with French and US researchers, the NOVA team published an article in Soft Matter titled A skyrmionic topology perspective on Lehmann clusters. The paper shows that in cholesteric liquid crystals, defects that would normally annihilate can instead form stable bound structures through three-dimensional reorientation of the director field, revealing a topology-governed mechanism for robust, long-lived defect states. Such defect stabilisation provides key insight into how stress- and flow-driven director reconfiguration can be controlled. This control over defect dynamics is crucial for the programmable patterning of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) using complex director-field architectures.

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The NOVA group published an article in Advanced Optical Materials titled Hierarchical Twist: Chirality Across Scales in Cellulose Cholesterics, addressing the chirality of cellulose liquid crystalline phases to gain a deeper understanding of their structural organisation and properties. Revealing the complex self-assembly of cellulose and understanding the behaviour of its chiral organisation are crucial for the preparation of cellulose-based liquid crystalline elastomers.
You can download the article (open access) here.