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Related papers: Active cholesterics: odder than odd elasticity

200 papers

Odd elasticity encompasses active elastic systems whose stress-strain relationship is not compatible with a potential energy. As the requirement of energy conservation is lifted from linear elasticity, new anti-symmetric (odd) components…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-07-15 Michele Fossati , Colin Scheibner , Michel Fruchart , Vincenzo Vitelli

Autonomous and driven transport in chiral active fluids have been shown to exhibit features that cannot be accommodated within the classical formulation of fluid mechanics, due to the role of odd viscosity. We generalize the theory of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-24 Michalis Chatzittofi , Yuto Hosaka , Andrej Vilfan , Ramin Golestanian

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-27 Sayantan Mondal , Jayashree Saha

In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-07 Robert A. Pelcovits , Robert B. Meyer

Chiral liquid crystals often exhibit periodic modulations in the molecular director; in particular, thin films of the smectic-C* phase show a chiral striped texture. Here, we investigate whether similar chiral modulations can occur in the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-31 J. V. Selinger , J. Xu , R. L. B. Selinger , B. R. Ratna , R. Shashidhar

Cholesteric elastomers possess a macroscopic ``phase chirality'' as the director n rotates in a helical fashion along an optical axis $z$ and can be described by a chiral order parameter. This parameter can be tuned by changing the helix…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-06-24 S. Courty , A. R. Tajbakhsh , E. M. Terentjev

Recently published preprint (A. Ashkinazi, H.Chhabra, A.El.Moumane, M.M.C.Tortora, J.P.K. Doye, Chirality transfer in lyotropic twist-bend nematics, arXiv:2508.03544v1 (2025)) has reawakened also interest to various mechanisms of chirality…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-09-23 E. I. Kats

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-01-16 Matthew J. Deutsch , Robin L. B. Selinger , Paul van der Schoot

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-09-26 Luuk Metselaar , Amin Doostmohammadi , Julia M. Yeomans

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.…

The free energy of antiferroelectric liquid crystal which takes into account polar order explicitly is presented. Steric, van der Waals, piezoelectric and flexoelectric interactions to the nearest layers and dipolar electrostatic…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-07 Mojca Cepic , Bostjan Zeks

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…

The dynamics of a quasi two-dimensional isotropic droplet in a cholesteric liquid crystal medium under symmetric shear flow is studied by lattice Boltzmann simulations. We consider a geometry in which the flow direction is along the axis of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-07-13 Federico Fadda , Giuseppe Gonnella , Antonio Lamura , Enzo Orlandini , Adriano Tiribocchi

We study in this work the 2D dynamics of an experimental system of disk-shaped rotors, fluidized by turbulent upflow. Contrary to previous knowledge, our experiments show the same particle chiral geometry can produce flows with different…

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-04-26 P. J. Ackerman , I. I. Smalyukh

Rheological properties of chiral active materials have been an important area of research in the recent past, in particular regarding odd terms in their mechanical response. While much progress has been made in the study of odd viscous…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-09-08 Debarghya Banerjee , Peter Sollich

Active materials, composed of internally driven particles, have properties that are qualitatively distinct from matter at thermal equilibrium. However, the most spectacular departures from equilibrium phase behaviour are thought to be…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-12-30 Ananyo Maitra , Martin Lenz , Raphael Voituriez

Colloidal particles disturb the alignment of rod-like molecules of liquid crystals, giving rise to long-range interactions that minimize the free energy of distorted regions. Particle shape and topology are known to guide this self-assembly…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-12-29 Ye Yuan , Angel Martinez , Bohdan Senyuk , Mykola Tasinkevych , Ivan I. Smalyukh

Chiral fluids - such as fluids under rotation or a magnetic field as well as synthetic and biological active fluids - flow in a different way than ordinary ones. Due to symmetries broken at the microscopic level, chiral fluids may have…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-09-04 Tali Khain , Michel Fruchart , Colin Scheibner , Thomas A. Witten , Vincenzo Vitelli

Chiral active matter is a variant of active matter systems in which the motion of the constituent particles violates mirror symmetry. In this letter, we simulate two-dimensional chiral Active Brownian Particles, the simplest chiral model in…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-12-03 Kangeun Jeong , Yuta Kuroda , Yuki Asatani , Takeshi Kawasaki , Kunimasa Miyazaki