Bing-Xiang Li

External fields can drive solitons into directed motion, making them promising carriers for information transport. However, controlling soliton motion and interactions remains challenging because many liquid-crystal topological solitons exhibit symmetry-constrained dynamics. Here, we report electrically driven polar solitons in chiral nematic liquid crystals. Flexoelectric torque, dielectric coupling, and chirality generate head–tail polarity and dipole-like behavior, enabling nonreciprocal dynamics and tunable interactions. By varying voltage amplitude, bias, and waveform, solitons exhibit perturbation-sensitive drift, circular, and linear trajectories. Head-to-head alignment causes repulsion, whereas head-to-tail pairing leads to attraction or fusion. Three-dimensional topology analysis further reveals that the polar soliton contains a closed nematic disclination loop with a finite-order Q -tensor core. The loop remains topologically nontrivial, whereas the soliton trajectory is selected dynamically through the field-dependent balance of elastic, dielectric, flexoelectric, and dissipative responses. These results establish a mechanism for programmable motion and interaction of defect-containing solitons in soft anisotropic matter.

Triplet‐triplet annihilation upconversion (TTA‐UC) in aggregate systems with high efficiencies has enormous potential for extensive application scenarios. However, it is still plagued with problems of not only toxicity and encapsulation difficulties resulting from organic solvents but low efficiencies in aggregate systems. Here, we construct a novel TTA‐UC aggregate system featured with a chiral photonic medium by directly doping a TTA‐UC dye pair into a cholesteric liquid crystal host with a specific photonic stopband. The upconversion emission was raised to the most accompanying with a decreased threshold when the photonic stopband inhibits the phosphorescence of the sensitizer leading to a promoted triplet‐triplet energy transfer process. This work uncovers a novel mechanism to construct TTA‐UC‐featured aggregate systems with boosted upconversion efficiencies, which demonstrates potentials for practical applications including photovoltaics and chiroptics.

Collective motion is a fundamental mode of organization in systems ranging from biological assemblies to driven physical media. Reproducing and controlling such behavior in soft-matter systems remains challenging, as soliton-soliton interactions are often symmetric, which tends to confine collective dynamics to predominantly repulsive motion. Here, we demonstrate that soliton ensembles can be reversibly switched among disordered, linear, and circular motion by electrical control, enabling regulation of soliton population, velocity, and trajectories. Circular motion stabilizes soliton populations while retaining information about earlier trajectories, allowing partial recovery of the original motional state. Under suitably designed electric-field configurations, localized many-body motion can also be achieved. These results establish a controllable route to collective dynamics based on localized solitonic textures and suggest general design principles for programmable self-organization in soft matter, with potential relevance to reconfigurable photonic structures and other driven many-body systems.

Circularly polarized organic afterglow (CPOA) materials have garnered considerable interest for their potential in information encryption, 3D displays, and sensing technologies. However, realizing CPOA materials that simultaneously offer high efficiency, long lifetime, high color purity, and large dissymmetry factor ( g _lum ) remains a significant challenge. Herein, an effective CP‐hyperafterglow design strategy that rationally integrates narrowband hyperafterglow polymers with cholesteric liquid crystal matrices is proposed. The resulting polymeric films deliver multicolor narrowband CP‐hyperafterglow emission with high photoluminescence quantum yields of up to 81%, emission bandwidths as narrow as ∼40 nm, ultralong lifetimes reaching 957 s, and maximum | g _lum | values of up to 1.3. Benefiting from these photophysical merits, various applications, including information encoding, multilevel encryption, and chiral display, are demonstrated. These findings offer a simple and reliable route toward high‐performance CP‐hyperafterglow, advancing the development of chiral optoelectronic materials and applications.

Circularly polarized organic afterglow (CPOA) materials have garnered considerable interest for their potential in information encryption, 3D displays, and sensing technologies. However, realizing CPOA materials that simultaneously offer high efficiency, long lifetime, high color purity, and large dissymmetry factor ( g _lum ) remains a significant challenge. Herein, an effective CP‐hyperafterglow design strategy that rationally integrates narrowband hyperafterglow polymers with cholesteric liquid crystal matrices is proposed. The resulting polymeric films deliver multicolor narrowband CP‐hyperafterglow emission with high photoluminescence quantum yields of up to 81%, emission bandwidths as narrow as ∼40 nm, ultralong lifetimes reaching 957 s, and maximum | g _lum | values of up to 1.3. Benefiting from these photophysical merits, various applications, including information encoding, multilevel encryption, and chiral display, are demonstrated. These findings offer a simple and reliable route toward high‐performance CP‐hyperafterglow, advancing the development of chiral optoelectronic materials and applications.

Despite the prospect of self‐powered clean energy systems, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are practically limited by low efficiency. Conventional material‐engineering strategies to boost performance, such as integrating dielectric and polar nanomaterials, continue to yield inadequate results. Here, we demonstrate a dramatic improvement in triboelectrification by incorporating a fluid‐like ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal (N _F ‐LC) as a functional filler into a common poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) matrix. The large spontaneous polarization and high dielectric constant of N _F ‐LCs serve as effective charge boosters, promoting the growth of electroactive phases, interfacial dipolar coupling, and long‐lived charge trapping. The optimized composite film produced a maximum ∼1.1 kV open‐circuit voltage, 50 µA short‐circuit current, and 110 W m ^{− 2} power density, representing an order‐of‐magnitude improvement over pure PVDF. The device demonstrates excellent charge storage capability, powers more than 500 LEDs without power management, and efficiently harvests low‐frequency acoustic energy. By linking molecular ferroelectric order with macroscopic charge generation, this work establishes an unprecedented route for high‐performance soft‐matter‐based energy technologies.

Dynamic and reversible control of circularly polarized ultralong room‐temperature phosphorescence (CP‐OURTP) is highly desirable for time‐gated chiroptical photonics. Yet, the simultaneous realization of handedness inversion and large dissymmetry factors remains challenging because inversion typically occurs near a net‐chirality cancellation point where the photonic bandgap (PBG) collapses. Here, we report a decoupled bilayer CP‐OURTP film that couples a room‐temperature phosphorescent polymer emitter with a photoresponsive chiral helical superstructure (CHS) engineered by an antagonistic chirality‐offset design. By pairing a high‐HTP chiral photoswitch with an oppositely handed static dopant, the net HTP reversibly crosses zero while remaining comparable in magnitude in the two photostationary states, thereby maintaining a robust PBG‐emission overlap on both sides of inversion. Consequently, the film delivers reversibly switchable g _lum up to ±1.0 under alternating 365 and 530 nm irradiation, together with a phosphorescence quantum yield of 21.4%, an ultralong lifetime up to 388 ms, and stable operation over 50 switching cycles. The combined CP‐OURTP and selective circular‐polarization reflection enable high‐fidelity rewritable anti‐counterfeiting labels. This CHS‐engineering strategy provides a general route to CP‐OURTP materials with on‐demand chiroptical control for multi‐level information encryption and smart photonic devices.

Liquid crystal (LC), a distinctive soft material that exhibits both fluid-like characteristics and crystalline anisotropy, has attracted significant interest in recent years due to its promising applications in radio frequency technologies. This paper introduces two multifunctional devices (MDs) utilizing nematic LC, specifically designed to operate across a range of temperatures. After an extensive characterization of the dielectric constant and loss tangent of the LC material (HSG14100-200), the LC-based MDs were developed based on well-established theoretical models. Within the temperature range of 40 °C to 180 °C, the MD incorporating a parallel-aligned LC cell demonstrated a peak resonant frequency shift of 0.16 GHz and a phase shift of 7.03°. In contrast, the MD with a perpendicular-aligned LC cell achieved a peak resonant frequency shift of 0.40 GHz and a phase shift of 20.53° over the same temperature range. Observations using a polarizing optical microscope revealed a distinct phase transition in both LC cells, providing direct evidence of its role in modulating dielectric properties. The ability to reconfigure both frequency and phase in the proposed MDs underscores the significant potential of LC in communication systems, particularly in the context of phased array and reconfigurable antennas. This work provides both a critical validation and a robust theoretical foundation, fostering further advancements in the radio frequency domain.

Stimuli‐responsive materials are pivotal for advanced photonics, yet achieving ones with multiple‐dimensional manipulation and high robustness remains a challenge. Here, we present a shape‐memory chiral photonic platform with multi‐stimuli‐responsiveness by sophisticatedly controlling the crosslinking chemistry and density of a triplet–triplet annihilation upconversion featured cholesteric elastomer. A thermally resettable shape memory effect on structural colors is induced by force in the elastomer with an oligomer‐lowered crosslinking density, which also exhibits exceptional stretchability and enhanced optics, a remarkable 259 nm blueshift over 215% strain. The covalent incorporation of annihilators secures homogeneity and stability of the system. The material possesses programmable optical properties, including chirally, thermally, and mechanically regulated structural colors and photoactivated luminescence, enabling high‐dimensional information encryption with accessibility to scalable spray‐printing. This work provides a versatile material strategy for cutting‐edge optical encryption and paves the way for next‐generation wearable sensors, adaptive optical devices, and interactive camouflage technologies.

Chaotic behaviors, epitomized by the butterfly effect where small causes have outsized consequences, are ubiquitous in light-matter interactions yet remain challenging to localize and even harder to engineer. Here, we demonstrate and model the direct light interacting with a programmable chaotic center—the core of photopatterning liquid-crystal topological vortices—where chaos reshapes into symmetry-protected light branching. Via confocal polarizing microscopy and Landau–de Gennes free-energy simulations, we observe the core splitting in-plane while spanning out-of-plane. This splitting pattern and peripherical director field dictate the branches number, while defect-induced refractive index variations with core-sensitive nonlinear dynamics yield distinct, spatially mapped Lorenz-like attractors. Applying a low-voltage field further allows us to reconfigure the splitting pattern and dynamically redirect the branching pathways. These findings potentially establish a versatile platform for on-chip topological photonics while serving as a laboratory analog for light scattering in extreme cosmological environments, such as near black holes.