The Pacific Polymer Conference (PPC) is organized by the Pacific Polymer Federation and is one of the most influential polymer science conferences in the world. The conference, which has 30 years’ history, is held every two years and has a good reputation around the world. As an international academic exchange platform, the Pacific Polymer Conference has strongly promoted academic discussions, exchanges and cooperation among polymer scientists from Pacific countries in recent years. The 16th Pacific Polymer Conference was held in the Suntec Convention Centre in Singapore from December 8 to December 12, 2019. The conference mainly discussed the latest developments in the fields of polymer physics, chemistry and materials, which attracted more than 1,000 scientists and engineers from many countries including Singapore, the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea participated.

Prof. Yongxiang Gao from the Institute for Advanced Study at Shenzhen University was invited to chair the section of Functional and Self-Assembled Materials by the organizing committee. He also delivered an invited talk titled Directed self-assembly into low-density colloidal liquids crystals at the conference. In his talk, he reported a new method for synthesizing colloidal Janus rods with one end magnetically functionalized. This particle possesses a permanent magnetic dipole moment that is perpendicular to its long axis. Under an applied magnetic field, the particle orientation can hop between a horizontal state and a vertical state against gravity due to an entropic effect, realizing a colloidal gyroscope. The particles can also self-assemble hierarchically into a low-density liquid crystal phase of densely packed self-assembled bottle brushes with anti-nematic characteristics and a new lamellar liquid crystal of densely packed planer brushes. This is the first time that the design space of self-assembling Janus colloids was expanded fully in three dimensions to encompass liquid crystals with new symmetries. These research results were published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review Materials (Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 248301, 2015 & Phys. Rev. Mater. 2, 015601, 2018).  

Photo: Prof. Yongxiang Gao at the 16th Pacific Polymer Conference