Related papers: Chirality Amplification and Detection by Tactoids …
The homochirality of biomolecules remains one of the outstanding puzzles concerning the beginning of life. Chiral amplification of a randomly perturbed racemic mixture of chiral molecules is a well-accepted prerequisite for all routes to…
Liquid crystal mesophases of achiral molecules are normally achiral, yet in a few materials they spontaneously segregate and form right- and left-handed chiral domains. One mechanism that drives chiral segregation is molecular shape…
Circular Dichroism (CD) can distinguish the handedness of chiral molecules. However, it is typically very weak due to vanishing absorption at low molecular concentrations. Here, we suggest Thermal Circular Dichroism (TCD) for chiral…
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 differential response of chiral molecules to incident left- and right- handed circularly polarized light is used for sensing the handedness of molecules. Currently, significant effort is directed towards enhancing weak differential…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
The chiral structure of liquid crystalline phases arises due to the intrinsic chirality of the constituent mesogens. While it is seemingly straightforward to quantify the macroscopic chirality by using, for instance, the cholesteric pitch…
In the close vicinity of a chiral nanostructure, the circular dichroism of a biomolecule could be greatly enhanced, due to the interaction with the local superchiral fields. Modest enhancement of optical activity using a planar…
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…
We study the chiral symmetry breaking and metastability of confined nematic lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) with and without chiral dopants. The isotropic-nematic coexistence phase of the LCLC renders two confining geometries:…
Colloidal crystal structures with complexity and diversity rivaling atomic and molecular crystals have been predicted and obtained for hard particles by entropy maximization. However, so far homochiral colloidal crystals, which are…
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…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
We present a new technique for detecting chirality in the gas phase: Chiral molecules are spatially aligned in three-dimensions by a moderately strong elliptically-polarized laser field. The momentum distributions of the charged fragments,…
Chirality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural world. Many biomolecules without inversion symmetry such as amino acids and sugars are chiral molecules. Measuring and controlling molecular chirality at a high precision down to the…
Intimately connected to the rule of life, chirality remains a long-time fascination in biology, chemistry, physics and materials science. Chiral structures, e.g., nucleic acid and cholesteric phase developed from chiral molecules are common…
This study explores the mechanisms behind the helical structures in cholesteric liquid crystalline (CLC) phases using molecular dynamics simulations. By adding chiral agents to the nematic liquid crystalline (NLC) compound, 5CB, the…
Chirality, a fundamental property of asymmetric structures, plays a crucial role in pharmaceutical, biological and chemical systems, offering a powerful tool for screening organic compounds. While the conventional optical chirality…
Chiral molecules form a number of non-chiral structures, the simplest being an isotropic fluid phase. In a mesophase of achiral molecules the fluctuations will on average be achiral as well: left-handed twists and right-handed twists will…
The molecules in lyotropic membranes are typically aligned with the surface normal. When these molecules are chiral, there is a tendency for the molecular direction to twist. These competing effects can reach a compromise by producing…