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