Hierarchically ordered complex soft materials: where additive manufacturing meets self-assembly

The project aims to integrate additive manufacturing (using two-photon polymerization) of nanoand microstructured 2D substrates and 3D geometric shapes of various topologies, embedded in the bulk of soft materials, with hierarchical self-assembly of molecular architectures or nanoparticle patterns in a soft environment when 3D printing does not directly determine their structural organization. The main objectives are to explore the fundamental principles of selfassembly in anisotropic soft condensed matter at the presence of non-trivial geometries of patterned substrates and complex 3D topologies embedded in the bulk; to study the basics of 3D printing of liquid crystal networks with non-trivial topologies, including topological solitons; to explore the fundamentals of shaping metasurfaces using printing of polymeric thin layers in the presence of nanoparticles. The project will also contribute to the development of topological data analysis approach for analyzing and predicting the structure-properties relationships of hierarchically organized and partially ordered soft matter-based systems, and to utilizing physicochemical models of soft matter states and their optical, spectral, and photonic properties.