Noel A. Clark

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Noel Anthony Clark (born December 17, 1940 in Cleveland , Ohio ) is an American physicist and professor at the University of Colorado .

Clark studied at John Carroll University with a bachelor's degree in 1963 and a master's degree in 1965 and received his doctorate in 1970 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under George Benedek . He was a post-graduate student at Harvard University . In 1973 he became an assistant professor and in 1981 professor at the University of Colorado . There he heads the Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center (later Soft Materials Research Center).

He deals with soft solid physics, especially liquid crystals and other complex liquids (such as colloids), the structure of liquids and melting processes (the nature of which he described as the process of condensation of broken bonds) and biophysics (biomembranes). He examined thin films of liquid crystals and ferroelectric liquid crystals, the exotic phases formed by banana-shaped molecules and the observed interaction of polarity and chirality, chiral phases of achiral molecules and liquid crystals made of nucleic acids. His group also investigated two-dimensional protein crystals as masks and templates for the production of nanostructures.

In 1984 he was one of the founders of Displaytech, which makes materials and devices using ferroelectric liquid crystals. He was a pioneer in the development of electro-optical applications of liquid crystals, in particular the use of ferroelectric liquid crystals for bistable, rapidly switchable light valves. They are used, among other things, in optical computers.

In 2006 he and Robert B. Meyer received the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for fundamental theoretical and experimental studies on liquid crystals, in particular their ferroelectric and chiral properties (laudation). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science , and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2007 . In 1985/86 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and received a Humboldt Research Award .

Fonts (selection)

  • with D. Chen u. a .: Chiral heliconal ground state of nanoscale pitch in a nematic liquid crystal of achiral molecular dimers, Proc. Nat. Acad., Vol. 110, 2013, pp. 15931-15935
  • with LE Hough u. a .: Helical nanofilament phases, Science, Volume 325, 2009, pp. 456-460
  • with LE Hough u. a .: Chiral isotropic liquids from achiral molecules, Science, Volume 325, 2009, 452-456
  • with GJ Fang u. a .: Athermal photofluidization of glasses, Nature Communications, Volume 4, 2013, p. 1521
  • with DK Yoon u. a .: Chirality-preserving growth of helical filaments in the B4 phase of bent-core liquid crystals, J. AM. Chem. Soc., Vol. 133, 2011, pp. 12656-12663

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ^ Buckley Prize 2006
personal data
SURNAME Clark, Noel A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clark, Noel Anthony (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH 17th December 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Cleveland , Ohio