Researchers from Ohio State University developed a novel way for liquid crystals to retain information about their movement. The technology has implications for memory devices and sensors, and could pave the way for future soft materials that are both smart and flexible, according to the researchers. Liquid crystals, used in LCD screens, mimic the properties of both liquids and solids. While soft materials like liquids, gels, and polymers have been widely used for their easy-to-process structures and lightweight properties, they tend to deform easily and often require replacement. Everyday materials are made of molecules that align themselves in preferred directions. But liquid crystals could become much more useful if their molecules are all facing in one direction, obtaining something called polar order. This can be difficult to do in soft materials, said Xiaoguang Wang, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University. “Soft matter can’t compete with existing solid-state storage in speed, reliability, or miniaturization, so the question becomes how might we control its internal structure to make it competitive or comparable to traditional hard materials,” said Wang. The movement of liquid crystals is programmable with the help of external forces, such as liquid or electricity. In this study’s case, the researchers used water droplets to determine whether they could influence the liquid crystals' interface. First, they etched pillars into a piece of silicon and infused liquid crystals between the spaces. Then they introduced a layer of water on top. Similar to how a magnet’s north and south poles would react to a magnetic field, the researchers saw that, depending on where the droplet was moved, the molecules would immediately respond by pointing in that direction. By moving the droplet over the liquid crystals a second time, that movement could then be changed and pointed in a new direction, according to Wang. Significantly, the experiment also revealed that liquid crystal molecules could be taught to remember their orientation, opening up new ways for soft materials to exchange information without the need for electronics. “It can memorize the directionality of the information that we write into it, which means that our vector-based system operates like a memory device,” Wang said. While scientists are still working to incorporate this method into bigger projects, gaining the ability to control the position of liquid crystals’ molecules could lead not only to new functionalities for all sorts of technologies, but also new types of physics, said Ufuoma Kara, lead author of the study and a former graduate research associate at Ohio State. “By imposing a greater level of polarity within these liquid crystal materials, we can explore new levels of applications,” he said. “Part of that includes expanding the amount of knowledge able to be embedded in their systems.” Cultivating materials with such capabilities on a larger scale would suggest that the next generation of liquid crystals may, one day, act as both super-small computer processors and vast, reprogrammable memory storage devices. The research was published in Nature Physics (www.doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-02966-x).