Related papers: Multi-level Chirality in Liquid Crystals Formed by…
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…
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…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning the fields of biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic…
The article seeks to formulate a synergetic law that is posited to be of common physicochemical and biological nature: an evolving system, possessing free energy and elements with chiral asymmetry may change the type of symmetry inside one…
Molecular chirality is critical to biochemical function, but it is unknown when chiral selectivity first became important in the evolutionary transition from geochemistry to biochemistry during the emergence of life. Here, we identify key…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are formed by achiral molecules with large dipole moments. Its three-dimensional orientational order is universally described as unidirectionally polar. We demonstrate that the ground state of…
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…
Chirality is probably the most mysterious among all symmetry transformations. Very readily broken in biological systems, it is practically absent in naturally occurring inorganic materials and is very challenging to create artificially.…
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…
We present a comprehensive overview of chirality and its optical manifestation in plasmonic nanosystems and nanostructures. We discuss top-down fabricated structures that range from solid metallic nanostructures to groupings of metallic…
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…
Liquid crystalline systems exhibiting both macroscopic chirality and smectic order experience frustration resulting in mesophases possessing complex three-dimensional order. In the twist-grain-boundary phase, defect lattices mediate the…
Polymorphism, the phenomenon that a species can exist in many discrete forms, is common in nature, such as hair colors in an animal species, flower colors in a tree species, and blood types in humans, etc. In materials science, it refers to…
Conceptualizing planetary habitability depends on understanding how living organisms originated and what features of environments are essential to foster abiogenesis. Estimates of the abundance of life's building blocks are confounded by…
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…
We report a computer simulation study on the effect of molecular structural biaxiality in the phase formation of chiral molecules. In this study, we have done coarse-grained modeling to observe self-assembled phase behavior. In our…
We study numerically the dynamics of acetanilide (ACN) molecules placed on a flat surface of a multilayer hexagonal boron nitride structure. We demonstrate that the ACN molecules, being achiral in three dimensions, become chiral after being…
Chirality is an intriguing property of certain molecules, materials or artificial nanostructures, which allows them to interact with the spin angular momentum of the impinging light field. Due to their chiral geometry, they can distinguish…