Cooling a liquid crystal at a rate of 10.000 Kelvin per second!

 22 December 2019

Can you imagine cooling a liquid at a rate of 10.000 degrees Kelvin per second? Just that was realized by the members of Soft Matter Lab and published recently in Liquid Crystals. 

A 2.5 µm layer of a liquid crystal was enclosed between two glass slides with transparent metallic electrodes. A strong laser pulse was delivered to this sandwiched LC, which upon light absorption heated above the clearing point. After the laser pulse ceased, the LC started cooling at an incredible rate of 10.000 Kelvin per second. The researchers also developed a new method of stroboscopic illumination of the LC during cooling with a temporal resolution of only 20 nanoseconds. Calculations show that it is possible by careful engineering of the experiment, to achieve cooling rates of the order of 1 million degrees Kelvin per second. Such extreme cooling rates will be applied to the study of monopole production via Kibble-Zurek mechanism in liquid crystals.