Arun Prakash Upadhyay, Prasenjit Sadhukhan
Supervisor: Dr. Sri Sivakumar
Indian Institute Of Technology, Kanpur

High sensitivity of Liquid Crystalline (LC) materials make them important constituent in bio/chemical sensors, micro fluidics chips, interfacial and optoelectronics applications. The performance and efficiency of LCs based devices relies mainly on sensitivity of LCs to molecular events, orientation of LCs, and the stability of LCs in aqueous medium. The fabrication challenges include consideration of long term stability of such devices in aqueous medium and the quantitative analysis of molecular event with individual LCs droplets. The present work demonstrates a processing technique that uses copper catalyzed azide/alkyne cycloaddition click reaction (CuAAC) to bind polymer-coated LCs droplets to a planar glass substrate, which is very prominent constituent of bio/chemical sensors, microfluidics chip, display and optoelectronics devices. Pattern immobilization of polymer-coated LCs droplets on glass substrate has also been demonstrated. The ease of processing and highly stable performance of the prepared immobilized polymer-coated LCs droplets suggest that the proposed method can be used for immobilization of different oil droplets over large area of planar substrate for fabricating various devices/ components.

.