Related papers: Modulated nematic structures and chiral symmetry b…
We propose a simple theoretical model which explains a formation of dipolar 2D and 3D colloidal structures in nematic liquid crystal. Colloidal particles are treated as effective hard spheres interacting via their elastic dipole, quadrupole…
Due to the mirror symmetry breaking, chiral structures show fantastic electromagnetic (EM) properties involving negative refraction, giant optical activity, and asymmetric transmission. Aligned electric and magnetic dipoles excited in…
We study the influence of fluctuations in molecular shape on the stability of the biaxial nematic phase by generalizing the mean field model of Mulder and Ruijgrok [Physica A {\bf 113}, 145 (1982)]. We limit ourselves to the case when the…
The paradigm of spontaneous symmetry breaking encompasses the breaking of the rotational symmetries $O(3)$ of isotropic space to a discrete subgroup, i.e. a three-dimensional point group. The subgroups form a rich hierarchy and allow for…
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…
The phase diagram for a lattice system of biaxial molecules possessing $D_{2h}$ symmetry and interacting with Straley's quadrupolar pair potential in Sonnet-Virga-Durand parameterization [A. M. Sonnet, E. G. Virga, and G. E. Durand, Phys.…
We have calculated the phase diagrams of one--component fluids made of five types of biaxial particles differing in their cross sections. The orientation of the principal particle axis is fixed in space, while the second axis is allowed to…
We investigate the phase behavior of colloidal suspensions of board-like particles under the effect of an external field and assess the still disputed occurrence of the biaxial nematic (N$_\text{B}$) liquid crystal phase. The external field…
We propose a variant of the antiferromagnetic XY model on the triangular lattice to study the interplay between the chiral and nematic orders in addition to the magnetic order. The model has a significant bi-quadratic interaction of the…
Using fundamental measure density functional theory we investigate paranematic-nematic and nematic-nematic phase coexistence in binary mixtures of circular platelets with vanishing thicknesses. An external magnetic field induces uniaxial…
An intermediate nematic phase is proposed for the interpretation of recent experimental results on phase biaxiality in bent-core nematics. The phase is macroscopically uniaxial but consists of microscopic biaxial, and possibly polar,…
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:…
The theory of elastic interaction of micron size axially symmetric colloidal particles immersed into confined nematic liquid crystal has been proposed. General formulas are obtained for the self energy of one colloidal particle and…
The interplay between spontaneous symmetry breaking in many-body systems, the wavelike nature of quantum particles and lattice effects produces an extraordinary behavior of the chiral current of bosonic particles in the presence of a…
For two-patch particles in two dimensions, we find that the coupling of anisotropic patchy interactions and the triangular lattice leads to novel phase behaviors. For asymmetric patch-patch (PP) and nonpatch-nonpatch (NN) interactions, the…
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 have numerically studied a liquid composed of achiral, bent-shaped molecules built of tangent spheres. The system is known to spontaneously break mirror symmetry, as it forms a macroscopically chiral, twist-bend nematic phase [Phys. Rev.…
Anisotropy at the level of the inter-particle interaction provides the particles with specific instructions for the self-assembly of target structures. The ability to synthesize non-spherical colloids, together with the possibility of…
We study a minimal model of a system with coexisting nematic and polar orientational orders, where one field tends to order and the other prefers isotropy. For strong coupling, the ordered field aligns the isotropic one, locking their…
Chiral symmetry breaking is ubiquitous in biological systems, from DNA to bacterial suspensions. A key unresolved problem is how chiral structures may spontaneously emerge from achiral interactions. We study a simple model of bacterial…