Related papers: Spontaneous sense inversion in helical mesophases
Many nanoparticle-based chiral liquid crystals are composed of polydisperse rod-shaped particles with considerable spread in size or shape, affecting the mesoscale chiral properties in, as yet, unknown ways. Using an algebraic…
The recently discovered twist-bend nematic phase, $\rm N_{tb}$, is a non-uniform equilibrium nematic phase that presents a spontaneous bend with a precession of the nematic director, $\textbf{n}$, on a conical helix with a tilt angle…
We present the first systematic observation of scaling of thermal hysteresis with the temperature scanning rate around an abrupt thermodynamic transition in correlated electron systems. We show that the depth of supercooling and…
We numerically investigate the phase behavior of thick shells of cholesteric liquid crystals with tangential anchoring at the shell boundary. For achiral liquid crystal, we demonstrate a thickness-dependent transition from a configuration…
In this work we numerically study the switching dynamics of a 2D cholesteric emulsion droplet immersed in an isotropic fluid under an electric field, which is either uniform or rotating with constant speed. The overall dynamics depend…
The viruses studied are genetically engineered, charged, semiflexible filamentous bacteriophages that are structurally identical to M13 virus, but differ either in contour length or surface charge. While varying contour length (L) we assume…
The hydrodynamic stresses created by active particles can destabilise orientational order present in the system. This is manifested, for example, by the appearance of a bend instability in active nematics or in quasi-2-dimensional living…
Chiral nematic or cholesteric liquid crystals (LCs) are mesophases with long-ranged orientational order featuring a quasi-layered periodicity imparted by a helical configuration but lacking positional order. Doping molecular cholesteric LCs…
There recently accumulated growing numerical and experimental evidence that a novel glassy zero-field phase characterized by the spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry, a chiral-glass phase, is realized in certain ceramic high-$T_c$…
We study the non-monotonic force-extension behaviour of helical ribbons using a new model for inextensible elastic strips. Unlike previous rod models our model predicts hysteresis behaviour for low-pitch ribbons of arbitrary material…
We detail the application of bounding volume hierarchies to accelerate second-virial evaluations for arbitrary complex particles interacting through hard and soft finite-range potentials. This procedure, based on the construction of…
Inspired by recent experiments on the spatial organization of bacterial chromosomes, we consider a type of "bottle brush" polymer consisting of a flexible backbone chain, to which flexible side loops are connected. We show that such a model…
We derive an unbiased information theoretic energy landscape for chromosomes at metaphase using a maximum entropy approach that accurately reproduces the details of the experimentally measured pair-wise contact probabilities between genomic…
We present a coarse-grained single-site potential for simulating chiral interactions, with adjustable strength, handedness, and preferred twist angle. As an application, we perform basin-hopping global optimisation to predict the favoured…
Motivated by Lehmann-like rotation phenomena in cholesteric drops we study the transverse drift of two types of cholesteric fingers, which form rotating spirals in thin layers of cholesteric liquid crystal in an ac or dc electric field. We…
We study the phase behaviour of a quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal shell. We characterise the topological phases arising close to the isotropic-cholesteric transition, and show that they differ in a fundamental way from…
Many biological and synthetic materials self-assemble into helical or twisted aggregates. The shape is determined by a complex interplay between elastic forces and the orientation and chirality of the constituent molecules. We study this…
The nematic twist-bend ($\mathrm{N_{TB}}$) phase, exhibited by certain thermotropic liquid crystalline (LC) dimers, represents a new orientationally ordered mesophase -- the first distinct nematic variant discovered in many years. The…
We investigate the statistical mechanics of chirality and biaxiality in liquid crystals through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Monte Carlo simulations, lattice mean-field theory, and Landau theory. All of these calculations…
A mechanical strain field applied to a monodomain cholesteric elastomer will unwind the helical director distribution. There is an analogy with the classical problem of an electric field applied to a cholesteric liquid crystal, but with…