Related papers: Saddle-splay screening and chiral symmetry breakin…
Using molecular simulations and classical density functional theory, we study the liquid-crystalline phase behaviour of a series of bent rod-like mesogens with a controlled degree of chirality introduced through a twist at the centre of the…
Monte Carlo molecular simulations of curve-shaped rods show the propensity of such shapes to polymorphism revealing both smectic and polar nematic phases. The nematic exhibits a nanoscale modulated local structure characterized by a unique,…
We carry out Monte Carlo simulations on fluid membranes with orientational order and multiple edges in the presence and absence of external forces. The membrane resists bending and has an edge tension, the orientational order couples with…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
Understanding chirality transfer from the molecular to the macroscopic scale poses a significant challenge in soft and biological condensed matter physics. Many nanorods of biological origin not only have chiral molecular features but also…
We study samples and a dipolar model of magnetic rods arranged on twisted polygonal clusters in terms of the twist angle. We find that the relative twist between polygons induces noncollinear chiral phases, ranging from flux vortex closure…
During the early developmental process of organisms, the formation of the left-right laterality requires a subtle mechanism, as it is associated with other principal body axes. Any inherent chiral feature in an egg cell can in principal…
Spin-glass and chiral-glass orderings of a three-dimensional isotropic Heisenberg spin glass are studied both by equilibrium and off-equilibrium Monte Carlo simulations with emphasis on their dynamical aspects. The model is found to exhibit…
Nematic twist--bend is the fifth nematic phase recognized in nature. This phase exhibits spiral orientational order, thus it is a chiral structure and it can be stabilized in systems composed of achiral molecules. The microscopic origin of…
We have studied the properties of biaxial particles interacting via an anisotropic pair potential, involving second rank quadrupolar and third rank octupolar coupling terms, using Monte Carlo simulation. The particles occupy the sites of a…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and plays crucial roles in biology, medicine, physics and materials science. Understanding and controlling chirality is therefore an important research challenge with broad implications in fundamental and…
Spin and chirality orderings of the three-dimensional Heisenberg spin glass under magnetic fields are studied by large-scale equilibrium Monte Carlo simulations. It is found that the chiral-glass transition and the chiral-glass ordered…
Most theoretical descriptions of lyotropic cholesteric liquid crystals to date focus on homogeneous systems in which the rod concentration, as opposed to the rod orientation, is uniform. In this work, we build upon the Onsager-Straley…
Cholesteric elastomers possess a macroscopic ``phase chirality'' as the director n rotates in a helical fashion along an optical axis $z$ and can be described by a chiral order parameter. This parameter can be tuned by changing the helix…
When a chiral isotropic elastomer is brought to low temperature cholesteric phase, the nematic degree of freedom tends to order and form a helix. Due to the nemato-elastic coupling, this also leads to elastic deformation of the polymer…
In equilibrium liquid crystals, chirality leads to a variety of spectacular three-dimensional structures, but chiral and achiral phases with the same broken continuous symmetries have identical long-time, large-scale dynamics. In this…
We stabilize nematic droplets with handles against surface-tension-driven instabilities using a yield-stress material as outer fluid and study the complex nematic textures and defect structures that result from the competition between…
We study the interaction between a ferromagnetically ordered medium and the surface states of a topological insulator with a general surface termination. This interaction is strongly crystal face dependent and can generate chiral states…