Related papers: Chirality Amplification and Chiral Segregation in …
We investigate the statistical mechanics of chirality and biaxiality in liquid crystals through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Monte Carlo simulations, lattice mean-field theory, and Landau theory. All of these calculations…
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…
Evidence of a special chiral nematic phase is provided using numerical simulation and Onsager theory for systems of hard helical particles. This phase appears at the high density end of the nematic phase, when helices are well aligned, and…
Strongly dipolar mesogenic compounds with a chiral center located in a lateral alkyl chain were synthesized, and shown to form the ferroelectric nematic phase. The presence of molecular chirality induced a helical structure in both the N…
Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in nature. Here we introduce a novel…
Recent numerical simulations of hard helical particle systems unveiled the existence of a novel chiral nematic phase, termed screw-like, characterised by the helical organization of the particle C$_2$ symmetry axes round the nematic…
How chirality propagates across scales remains an open question in many biological and synthetic systems. An especially clear manifestation of this propagation is found in in vitro gliding assays of cytoskeletal filaments on surfaces,…
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…
A cluster growth model is proposed to study chiral symmetry breaking in stirred crystallization from an achiral element. Achiral monomers are assumed to coagulate to form chiral clusters from dimers to hexamers. Due to the stirring, the…
We introduce a model to describe columnar phases of chiral discotic liquid phases in which the normals to disc-like molecules are constrained to lie parallel to columnar axes. The model includes separate chiral interactions favoring,…
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…
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…
A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the…
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…
This study investigates the influence of chirality, viscous effects, and confinement geometry on the flow dynamics and defect structures of cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) using numerical simulations. As chiral strength increases,…
Biomolecules are often very long with a definite chirality. DNA, xanthan and poly-gamma-benzyl-glutamate (PBLG) can all form columnar crystalline phases. The chirality, however, competes with the tendency for crystalline order. For chiral…
Motivated by experiments on colloidal membranes composed of chiral rod-like viruses, we use Monte Carlo methods to determine the phase diagram for the liquid crystalline order of the rods and the membrane shape. We generalize the…
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…
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…
Suspended droplets of cholesteric (chiral nematic) liquid crystals spontaneously rotate in the presence of a heat flux due to a temperature gradient, a phenomenon known as Lehmann effect. So far, it is not clear whether this effect is due…