Smectic liquid crystal foam under confinement

 

Foams are substances that are made by air bubbles dispersed in a liquid or a solid. These materials have an exciting range of characteristics and can be important in our daily lives. They can be found in creams, meringue cookies, soda, shaving foam, and Styrofoam. The structure of foams is still a heated topic among physicists and mathematicians, not only because these systems present an essential role in fundamental research but also because they are vastly expanded in the development of many industrial applications, such as thermal insulation, packing, flotation, and oil recovery. While most of the studies of foams focus on bubbles made of simple fluids, little is known about how foams arrange and pack when they are made of ordered materials such as liquid crystals. In this work, we investigate how liquid crystal foams behave under confinement. We study the interplay between elasticity and surface tension and investigate how their balance may affect the foam structure, assembly, and stability.