Dr. Sharmistha Ghosh, Ph.D

Hello! I am an experimental physicist and my research aims to develop understanding of self-assembly and self-organizing materials, especially liquid crystals with reduced symmetry. I have adopted several experimental techniques that allow novel aspects of liquid crystals to be investigated. Much of my work has involved understanding both static and field-induced structures in polar liquid crystals. In ferroelectric and antiferroelectric liquid crystal systems I employed SAXS,dielectric spectroscopy and electro-optical methods to deduce structures. I carried out some of the earliest work on nano-doped liquid crystals, a topic that has found significant renewed interest in the last 5 years. I have been interested in the nematic phasese exhibited by 'bent core' liquid crystals since around 2013, and we made the first measurements of ferroelectric like switching in such systems. This is an ongoing interest and while the existence of ferro-fluid is hotly debated, these nematic systems are nonetheless extremely interesting. I have also carried out several investigations of blue phases in bent-core liquid crystalline systems. Finally, I work in collaboration with various international scientists.