Prof. Robert B. Meyer

Physics Department MS057, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110, USA

Phone: (781) 736-2870, Fax: (781) 736-2915, e-mail: meyer@brandeis.edu

Prof. Meyer has studied complex fluids, mainly liquid crystals, since beginning his Ph.D. thesis research with Dave Turnbull at Harvard in 1966. His current interests include hyper-complex fluid systems, such as nematic gels, and liquid crystals in confined geometries, as well as smart materials, especially smart optical reflectors based on cholesterics. Hyper-complex fluid systems combine two or more complex fluids in a way that imparts new properties to the combined system. An example is a cholesteric gel, which is a soft solid with the symmetry and other properties of a cholesteric; when submitted to a static shear strain, this system exhibits piezoelectricity, an electrical polarization proportional to the shear strain. This requires the combination of the solidity of the gel and the chiral symmetry and structure of the cholesteric. A smart material is one that changes its properties in a useful way in response to an external stimulus; an example is the material of photochromic sunglasses, which are clear in dim lighting, and darken in bright sunlight. See the "Research Topics and Related Papers" section on our home page for current research problems of Prof. Meyer's group.