Related papers: Spontaneous sense inversion in helical mesophases
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…
Recently published preprint (A. Ashkinazi, H.Chhabra, A.El.Moumane, M.M.C.Tortora, J.P.K. Doye, Chirality transfer in lyotropic twist-bend nematics, arXiv:2508.03544v1 (2025)) has reawakened also interest to various mechanisms of chirality…
We study the phase diagram of director structures in cholesteric liquid crystals of negative dielectric anisotropy in homeotropic cells of thickness d which is smaller than the cholesteric pitch p. The basic control parameters are the…
We systematically study phase transformations from one helical structure to another. Motivated in part by recent work that relates the presence of compatible interfaces with properties such as the hysteresis and reversibility of a phase…
We consider a model for periodic patterns of charges constrained over a cylindrical surface. In particular we focus on patterns of chiral helices, achiral rings or vertical lamellae, with the constraint of global electroneutrality. We study…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Molecular chirality, and the chiral symmetry breaking of resulting macroscopic phases, can be topologically imprinted and manipulated by crosslinking and swelling of polymer networks. We present a new experimental approach to…
We study how dispersions of colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal behave under a time-dependent electric field. By controlling the amplitude and shape of the applied field wave, we show that the system can be reproducibly…
The order parameters for the phenomenological description of the smectic-{\it A} to smectic-{\it C} phase transition are formulated on the basis of molecular symmetry and structure. It is shown that, unless the long molecular axis is an…
We use a series of molecular dynamics simulations, and analytical theory, to demonstrate that a system of hard spheres confined to a narrow cylindrical channel exhibits a continuous phase transition from an isotropic fluid at low densities,…
Polar active particles constitute a wide class of synthetic colloids that are able to propel along a preferential direction, given by their polar axis. Here, we demonstrate a generic self-phoretic mechanism that leads to their spontaneous…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
B-DNA solutions of suitable concentration form left-handed chiral nematic phases (cholesterics). Such phases have also been observed in solutions of other stiff or semiflexible chiral polymers; magnitude and handedness of the cholesteric…
We investigate the emergence of chiral meso-structures in one-dimensional fluids consisting of stacked discotic particles and demonstrate that helical undulations are generated spontaneously from internal elastic stresses. The stability of…
The mechanical response of glasses remains challenging to understand. Recent results indicate that the oscillatory rheology of soft glasses is accompanied by a sharp non-equilibrium transition in the microscopic dynamics. Here, we use…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
We present a microscopic analysis of the instability of the nematic phase to chirality when molecular chirality is introduced perturbatively. We show that previously neglected short-range biaxial correlations play a crucial role in…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
We report a study of the reorientation of the helimagnetic order in the archetypal cubic chiral magnet MnSi as a function of magnetic field direction. The reorientation process as inferred from small-angle neutron scattering, the…
We describe the basic properties and consequences of introducing active stresses, with principal direction along the local director, in cholesteric liquid crystals. The helical ground state is found to be linearly unstable to extensile…