Clark has worked in many areas in soft condensed matter and complex fluid physics, including liquid crystals, colloidal liquids and crystals, liquid structure and melting, and biophysics. His liquid crystal research has focused on the use of ultrathin freely-suspended films to study the effects of interfacial confinement and low dimensionality on phase behavior, and on liquid crystal electro-optics, in particular the physics and applications of ferroelectric liquid crystals. His current interests are in liquid crystals of nucleic acids and in the exotic soft phases formed by banana-shaped molecules, especially their interplay of polarity and chirality, and the appearance of macroscopic chiral phases in fluids of achiral molecules.[4]
Professor Clark's group has pioneered a major new liquid crystal electro-optic technology, employing ferroelectric liquid crystals to make high-speed bistable light valves. These devices, which can be configured into linear and matrix arrays, are of particular use in optical computing and are one of the principal technologies to be developed in the Center for Optoelectronic Computing Systems at the University of Colorado. Recently the group has begun a new project on fabrication of structures on a nanometer length scale. This work, which grew out of their research on biomembrane liquid crystals, is directed toward using two-dimensional protein crystals as fabrication masks and templates.[5]
