Related papers: On the origin and structure of liquid crystalline …
We report large scale simulations of the blue phases of cholesteric liquid crystals. Our results suggest a structure for blue phase III, the blue fog, which has been the subject of a long debate in liquid crystal physics. We propose that…
Computer simulation study of phase transitional behaviour of cholesterol molecules embedded with terminal dipole is reported. In this work, coarse-grained modeling of cholesteric molecules is done to study the influence of the coupled…
A promising approach to the fabrication of materials with nanoscale features is the transfer of liquid-crystalline structure to polymers. However, this has not been achieved in systems with full three-dimensional periodicity. Here we…
We present a molecular dynamics study of the liquid and plastic crystalline phases of CCl$_3$Br. We investigated the short-range orientational order using a recently developed classification method and we found that both phases behave in a…
We investigate numerically the behaviour of a phase-separating mixture of a blue phase I liquid crystal with an isotropic fluid. The resulting morphology is primarily controlled by an inverse capillary number, $\chi$, setting the balance…
Crystalline $\rm Bi_2Se_3$ is one of the most explored three-dimensional topological insulator, with a $0.3\;\rm eV$ energy gap making it promising for applications. Its amorphous counterpart could bring to light new possibilities for large…
The blue phases are observed in highly chiral liquid crystalline compositions that nascently organize into a three-dimensional, crystalline nanostructure. The periodicity of the unit cell lattice parameters is on the order of the wavelength…
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…
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…
Liquid crystalline polymers are materials of considerable scientific interest and technological value to society [1-3]. An important subset of such materials exhibit rubber-like elasticity; these can combine the remarkable optical…
Recently, a new class of smectic liquid crystal phases (SmCP phases) characterized by the spontaneous formation of macroscopic chiral domains from achiral bent-core molecules has been discovered. We have carried out Monte Carlo simulations…
It is shown that a condensation transition involving a chiral order parameter can occur in itinerant helimagnets, in analogy to the transition between the isotropic phase and the phase known as blue fog or blue phase III in cholesteric…
We numerically study the dynamics of two-dimensional blue phases in active chiral liquid crystals. We show that introducing contractile activity results in stabilised blue phases, while small extensile activity generates ordered but dynamic…
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…
In this work the influence of cylindrical shape and alignment layers on light reflection in Blue Phase Liquid Crystal (BPLC) is presented. For the first time, the process of BP domains growth in a capillary is presented. The cylindrical…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
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…
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…
By molecular modeling we demonstrate that the nematic long-range order discovered in bent-core liquid crystal systems should reveal further spatially homogeneous phases. Two of them are identified as a tetrahedratic nematic ($N_T$) phase…
Smectic blue phases (BPSm) are new mesophases of thermotropic liquid crystals, which exhibit a double geometrical frustration: the extension of chirality in three spatial dimensions like the classical blue phases, and helical twist…