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Understanding how nanostructure and nanomechanics influence physical material properties on the micro- and macroscale is an essential goal in soft condensed matter research. Mechanisms governing fragmentation and chirality inversion of…
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…
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…
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…
Recent experiments on monolayers of spindle-like cells plated on adhesive stripe-shaped domains have provided a convincing demonstration that certain types of collective phenomena in epithelia are well described by active nematic…
Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (CLCs), subject to externally applied magnetic fields and confined between two parallel planar surfaces with strong homeotropic anchoring conditions, are found to undergo transitions to different types of…
Chiral nanostructures offer the ability to respond to the vector nature of a light beam at the nanoscale. While naturally chiral materials offer a path towards scalability, engineered structures offer a path to wavelength tunability through…
In equilibrium liquid crystals, chirality leads to a variety of spectacular three-dimensional structures, but chiral and achiral phases with the same broken continuous symmetries have identical long-time, large-scale dynamics. In this…
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…
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…
During the early developmental process of organisms, the formation of the left-right laterality requires a subtle mechanism, as it is associated with other principal body axes. Any inherent chiral feature in an egg cell can in principal…
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…
We use full nematohydrodynamic simulations to study the statics and dynamics of monolayers of cholesteric liquid crystals. Using chirality and temperature as control parameters we show that we can recover the two-dimensional blue phases…
This paper reviews the complex ordered structures induced by chirality in liquid crystals. In general, chirality favors a twist in the orientation of liquid-crystal molecules. In some cases, as in the cholesteric phase, this favored twist…
Chirality, ubiquitous in complex biological systems, can be controlled and quantified in synthetic materials such as cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) systems. In this work, we study spherical shells of CLC under weak anchoring conditions.…
Chirality, an intrinsic handedness, is one of the most intriguing fundamental phenomena in nature. Materials composed of chiral molecules find broad applications in areas ranging from nonlinear optics and spintronics to biology and…
Various active materials exhibit strong spatio-temporal variability of their orientational order known as active turbulence, characterised by irregular and chaotic motion of topological defects, including colloidal suspensions,…
Ferroelectric nematic phases are a new class of polar fluids in which spontaneous polarization is directly coupled to the orientational order, providing unique opportunities for creating self-organized materils with spatially modulated…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
Even though chiral nematic phases were the first liquid crystals experimentally observed more than a century ago, the origin of the thermodynamic stability of cholesteric states is still unclear. In this Letter we address the problem by…