The ALCEMISTs from NOVA published an invited Perspective paper highlighting the emerging potential of solvent-free thermotropic cellulose liquid crystals as sustainable photonic materials by connecting molecular chirality, hierarchical self-assembly, processing, and optical functionality. Its main novelty is providing an integrated framework for understanding and designing adaptive cellulose-based photonic systems, directly supporting ALCEMIST's objective of establishing predictive design principles for renewable structural colour materials.

The paper, titled Cellulose-based self-assembled photonic structures: linking chirality, structure and optical function across scales, is published (open access) in Journal of Physics: Photonics, 8, 021001, 2026. Please click here to read it.

Tags: CNC

ALCEMIST team members Zornitza Tosheva and Jan Lagerwall (both of the ESMP group in Luxembourg) published a very thorough study that has been a long time in the making, demonstrating how the generation of shear-induced nematic phase during ultrasonication of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) suspensions greatly improves the results of the sonication. This means that the concentration of nanoparticles during sonication, which frequently is an almost ignored parameter, plays a huge role, and this applies also to other anisometric nanoparticles, like carbon nanotubes, graphene flakes and so on.

The paper, titled Orientational ordering benefits nanorod sonication, is published (open access) in Physical Review Materials. You can read it here. And here is a Linked In post introducing the paper for a broader scientific audience.


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Tags: CNC

Jan was invited by ACS Accounts of Materials Research to write a perspective article which he chose to devote to cholesteric liquid crystals and their broad application opportunities. One of the featured examples are the mechanochromic CLCE fibers that play a key role in WP3 of ALCEMIST, specifically the quest to turn these into suture threads that will help robotic surgeons understand how hard they tie the suture, so they don't break them during surgery.

You can download the open access article, titled Innovative Applications Enabled by the Versatile Structural Color of Cholesteric Liquid Crystals, from the ACS AMR website.

Tags: CLCEs

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.

Download the (open access) article here.

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.

While not a result of ALCEMIST, Jan's latest paper, together with chemist Rijeesh Kizhakidathazath and concrete engineers Tarik Čamo and Danièle Waldmann-Diederich, on using CLCEs in structural health monitoring is strongly related to the project. The paper demonstrates how the same mechanochromic response of CLCEs that will be used in strain sensing fibers in ALCEMIST can be used to detect and monitor cracks in concrete. By painting the CLCE precursor onto the object of interest, a crack developing in it is immediately revealed—much earlier than when it could be seen by the naked eye—through a local color change over the crack. This can have a great impact on detecting structural problems in bridges and other infrastructure before they fail, thus avoiding costly repairs and possibly saving lives. Read the paper that was published (open access) in the journal Structural Health Monitoring here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14759217241296831

Tags: CLCEs