Related papers: Spontaneous sense inversion in helical mesophases
Hard helices can be regarded as a paradigmatic elementary model for a number of natural and synthetic soft matter systems, all featuring the helix as their basic structural unit: from natural polynucleotides and polypeptides to synthetic…
Microscopic active droplets are of interest since they can be used to transport matter from one point to another. The challenge is to control the trajectory. In this work, we demonstrate an approach to control the direction of active…
Using classical Monte Carlo simulations, we study a simple statistical mechanical model of relevance to the emergence of polarisation from local displacements on the square and cubic lattices. Our model contains two key ingredients: a…
The magnetic helicities of the cycloidal ordering in EuIrGe$_3$, with a noncentrosymmetric tetragonal structure, have been studied by circularly polarized resonant X-ray diffraction. It is shown that the helicity of each cycloidal domain is…
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…
We construct phase diagrams for charged rodlike colloids within the second-virial approximation as a function of rod concentration, salt concentration, and colloidal charge. Besides the expected isotropic-nematic transition, we also find…
As much as chiral metasurfaces are significant in stereochemistry and polarization control, tunable chiroptical response is important for their dynamic counterparts. A single metasurface device with invertible chiral states can selectively…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
Lyotropic cholesteric liquid crystal phases are ubiquitously observed in biological and synthetic polymer solutions, characterized by a complex interplay between thermal fluctuations, entropic and enthalpic forces. The elucidation of the…
The surface free energy of ideal hard rods near curved hard surfaces is determined to second order in curvature for surfaces of general shape. In accordance with previous results for spherical and cylindrical surfaces it is found that this…
In the hexagonal columnar phase of chiral polymers a bias towards cholesteric twist competes with braiding along an average direction. When the chirality is strong, topological defects proliferate, leading to either a tilt grain boundary…
The yet virtually unexplored class of soft colloidal rods with small aspect ratio is investigated and shown to exhibit a very rich phase and dynamic behavior, spanning from liquid to nearly melt state. Instead of nematic order, these short…
We propose a hybrid lattice Boltzmann algorithm to simulate the hydrodynamics of colloidal particles inside a liquid crystalline host. To validate our algorithm, we study the static and the microrheology of a colloid in a nematic, with…
Recent progress in constructing supramolecular assemblies with hierarchical chirality offers new opportunities to investigate the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect and its potential applications. In this work, we…
Chirality is a recurrent theme in the study of biological systems, in which active processes are driven by the internal conversion of chemical energy into work. Bacterial flagella, acto-myosin filaments and microtubule bundles are active…
Chiral active materials display odd dynamical effects in both their elastic and viscous responses. We show that the most symmetric mesophase with two-dimensional odd elasticity in three dimensions is chiral, polar and columnar, with…
We study the effects of quenched charge disorder on the phase reconstruction near itinerant ferromagnetic quantum critical points in three spatial dimensions. Combining a replica disorder average with a fermionic version of the quantum…
We use numerical simulations to show how a fully flexible filament binding to a deformable cylindrical surface may acquire a macroscopic persistence length and a helical conformation. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to…
The probability laws associated with random tensors or tensor field theories are traditionally equilibrium distributions. In this paper, we consider a stochastic point of view, and approach the quantization by a Langevin type equation. We…
We explore the hysteretic dynamics of spinor Bose-Einstein condensates of ultracold atoms loaded in static 2D ring geometries and subjected to varying synthetic magnetic fields. Electrically neutral, pseudo-spin-$1/2$ condensates are probed…