Related papers: Spontaneous sense inversion in helical mesophases
We examine the influence of bidirectional anchoring on the unwinding of a planar cholesteric liquid crystal induced by the application of a magnetic field. We consider a liquid crystal layer confined between two plates with the helical axis…
Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) have a characteristic length scale given by the pitch of the twisted stacking of their constituent rod-like molecules. Under homeotropic anchoring conditions where the molecules prefer to orient…
The shape of the building blocks plays a crucial role in directing self-assembly towards desired architectures. Out of the many different shapes, helix has a unique position. Helical structures are ubiquitous in nature and a helical shape…
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…
A phase transition can drive the spontaneous emergence of chiral orders in crystals below a critical temperature. However, selecting either a right- or a left-handed phase with the aid of electromagnetic fields is challenging, particularly…
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
We study the phase behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystal shells with different geometries. We compare the cases of tangential and no anchoring at the surface, focussing on the former case, which leads to a competition between the…
Recently discovered helical polar fluid adopts a spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) driven by polarization escape and conformational chirality. Ferroelectric nematic and smectic phases are intrinsically chiral in the ground state…
Evidence of a special chiral nematic phase is provided using numerical simulation and Onsager theory for systems of hard helical particles. This phase appears at the high density end of the nematic phase, when helices are well aligned, and…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
The recent discovery of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking has demonstrated the possibility of discovering the exotic textures of ferromagnetic systems in liquid crystalline fluid ferro-electrics. We show that the polar smectic mesophase…
We consider a Lebwohl-Lasher model of chiral particles confined in a planar cell (slit pore) with different boundary conditions, and solve it using mean-field theory. The phase behaviour of the system with respect to temperature and pore…
We report measurements of the cholesteric pitch and twist elastic constant $(K_{22})$ in monodisperse suspensions of the rod-like virus filamentous bacteriophage {\it fd}. Measurements were taken for concentrations spanning the entire…
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…
Helical objects are often implemented in electronic or mechanical micro-systems, requiring a precise understanding of their mechanical properties. While helices formed by cylindrical filaments have been intensely investigated, little is…
Selective reflection of light by oblique helicoidal cholesteric (ChOH) can be tuned in a very broad spectral range by an applied electric field. In this work, we demonstrate that the peak wavelength of the selective reflection can be…
We present a generalized van der Waals theory for a lyotropic cholesteric system of chiral spherocylinders based on the classical Onsager theory for hard anisometric bodies. The rods consist of a hard spherocylindrical backbone surrounded…
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…
We present a theoretical study of director fields in toroidal geometries with degenerate planar boundary conditions. We find spontaneous chirality: despite the achiral nature of nematics the director configuration show a handedness if the…
We consider helical configurations of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) sandwiched between two substrates with homogeneous director orientation favored at both confining plates. We study the CLC twist wavenumber $q$ characterizing the…