Related papers: Intrinsically chiral ferronematic liquid crystals
A significant effort in condensed matter physics is dedicated to the search for exotic arrangements of electric dipoles in crystals. Non-collinear dipolar arrangements mimicking magnetic spin textures, such as polar vortices and skyrmions,…
Polar nematic liquid crystals have two special features, compared with conventional nematic liquid crystals. First, because of flexoelectricity, the combination of polar order and splay reduces the free energy. Second, because of…
What kind of one-dimensional modulated nematic structures (ODMNS) can form nonchiral and chiral bent-core and dimeric materials? Here, using Landau-deGennes theory of nematics, extended to account for molecular steric polarization, we study…
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…
Collinear dipole orders such as ferroelectricity and antiferroelectricity have developed rapidly in last decades. While, the noncollinear dipole orders are rarely touched in solids. Noncollinear dipole orders can provide a route to realize…
We report the smectic $A_F$, a new liquid crystal phase of the ferroelectric nematic realm. The smectic $A_F$ is a phase of small polar, rod-shaped molecules which form two-dimensional fluid layers spaced by approximately the mean molecular…
We have structurally characterized the liquid crystal phase that appears as an intermediate state when a dielectric nematic, having polar disorder of its molecular dipoles, transitions to the almost perfectly polar-ordered ferroelectric…
The origin of recently observed spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in polar fluids is an unsolved problem, and poses fundamental questions as to how heliconical structures emerge in systems composed of achiral molecules. We report on the…
Recent experimental realization of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline phases stimulated material development and numerous experimental studies of these new phases, guided by their fundamental and applicative interest. In this…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals are one-dimensional photonic band-gap materials whose reflection wavelength can be well tuned by temperature, but only limited and irreversible tuning can be achieved by electric fields. In contrast, oblique…
Understanding nanoscale mechanisms responsible for the recently discovered ferroelectric nematics can be helped by direct visualization of self-assembly of strongly polar molecules. Here we report on scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)…
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…
We show that surface interactions can vectorially structure the three-dimensional polariza-tion field of a ferroelectric fluid. The contact between a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal and a surface with in-plane polarity generates a…
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…
We demonstrate an exceptional ability of a high-polarisation 3D ferroelectric liquid to form freely-suspended fluid fibres at room temperature. Unlike fluid threads in modulated smectics and columnar phases, where translational order is a…
Freestanding slender fluid filaments of room temperature ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are described. They are stabilized either by internal electric fields of bound charges formed due to polarization splay, or by external voltage…
Recently discovered helical polar fluid adopts a spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (CSB) driven by polarization escape and conformational chirality. Ferroelectric nematic and smectic phases are intrinsically chiral in the ground state…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals represent not only interesting fundamental science, but they also hold promise for storage capacitors with high power density or new information display technology having sub-millisecond switching. In…
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…
Chiral nematic or cholesteric liquid crystals (LCs) are mesophases with long-ranged orientational order featuring a quasi-layered periodicity imparted by a helical configuration but lacking positional order. Doping molecular cholesteric LCs…