Density Functional Theory for Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystals
Soft Condensed Matter
2014-09-05 v1 Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
Even though chiral nematic phases were the first liquid crystals experimentally observed more than a century ago, the origin of the thermodynamic stability of cholesteric states is still unclear. In this Letter we address the problem by means of a novel density functional theory for the equilibrium pitch of chiral particles. When applied to right-handed hard helices, our theory predicts an entropy-driven cholesteric phase, which can be either right- or left-handed, depending not only on the particle shape but also on the thermodynamic state. We explain the origin of the chiral ordering as an interplay between local nematic alignment and excluded-volume differences between left- and right-handed particle pairs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1404.2113,
title = {Density Functional Theory for Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystals},
author = {S. Belli and S. Dussi and M. Dijkstra and R. van Roij},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.2113},
year = {2014}
}