Created by Alexey Eremin vor 41 Tagen um 15:12 Uhr:
The German Liquid Crystal Society mourns the passing of Prof. Wim de Jeu, who died on 3 June 2026.
Wim de Jeu was an inspiring scientist, who worked in the area of soft matter physics whereby he focused on “self-organized” materials, mostly of liquid crystalline nature. He was born 1943 in Leersum (NL) and died recently in Heerlen, NL (June 3rd 2026) at the age of 83.
Over all, he got famous for his “physical view” on new liquid crystalline materials and the use of refined (X-ray) scattering methods to characterize various smectic phases. In addition, he had a great interest in structure – property relations, which made him an ideal partner for synthetic groups (see the list of his scientific activities, (Link).). In this respect he was essential to the characterization and further development of the new polymeric liquid crystalline compounds. This brought him in close contact with LC-groups in Halle (Fischer), Freiburg (Finkelmann) and Mainz (Zentel). In this context he studied the effect of polymer-networks and their crosslinking points in liquid crystalline elastomers [1, 2] and of phase separation in liquid crystalline block-copolymers [3]. Finally he was awarded the “Alfred Saupe Award” in 2018 at the annual meeting of the “German Liquid Crystal Society” (see Fig. 1). The laudation presented for this purpose is enclosed (Link).
Fig. 1: Awarding the Saupe Medal to Wim de Jeu, from left: Frank Giesselmann, Wim de Jeu, Brigitte Saupe (widow of A. Saupe) and Rudolf Zentel
It should be noted that besides his scientific activities Wim de Jeu was also very actively engaged in the education of students and the promotion and training of young up-coming scientists. This showed up by his engagement in the “establishment of the Science Department” at the “Open University of the Netherlands” (1984 -94) for which he acted as dean of the faculty and in the fact that he wrote three books on his topics (Physical Properties of Liquid Crystalline Materials; Liquid Crystal Elastomers, Materials and Applications; Basic X-Ray Scattering for Soft Matter). In addition he used -at the end of his career- much time at the University of Mass. at Amherst and at the TH Aachen for the training of students.
[1] Induced long-range order in crosslinked "one-dimensional" stacks of fluid monolayers
G.C.L. Wong, W. de Jeu, H. Shao, K.S. Liang, R. Zentel
NATURE 389, 576 - 579 (1997); https://doi.org/10.1038/39271
[2] Order and Disorder in Liquid-Crystalline Elastomers,
WH de Jeu, BI Ostrovskii,
Adv. Polym. Sci., 250, 187-234 (2012); DOI 10.1007/12_2010_105
[3] Orientational Wetting in Hybrid Liquid Crystalline Block Copolymers
G.C.L. Wong, J. Commandeur, H. Fischer, WH de Jeu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 5221 (1996); DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.77.5221
written by Rudolf Zentel