Related papers: Chiral twist-bend liquid crystals
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
The interface of a cholesteric liquid crystal with an isotropic fluid can display a range of unusual properties, such as a layer of topological defects close to an undulated interface. These properties have been know for a long time and…
We explore the rheology and flow-induced morphological changes of cholesteric liquid crystal patterns subject to Poiseuille flow within a slab geometry, and under different anchoring conditions at the wall. Our focus is particularly on the…
We present detailed systematic studies of structural transformations in thin liquid crystal films with the smectic-C to hexatic phase transition. For the first time all possible structures reported in the literature are observed for one…
In this Letter, we predict a structural phase transition unique to chiral crystals with screw symmetry. In chiral crystals, the phonon frequency renormalized by the electron-phonon coupling depends on the handedness of circular…
Experiments on spherical particles in a 3D Couette cell vibrated from below and sheared from above show a hysteretic freezing/melting transition. Under sufficient vibration a crystallized state is observed, which can be melted by sufficient…
The biaxial phase in nematic liquid crystals has been elusive for several decades after its prediction in the 1970s. A recent experimental breakthrough was achieved by Liu et al. [PNAS 113, 10479 (2016)] in a liquid crystalline medium with…
Orbital angular momentum and torque transfer play central roles in a wide range of magnetic textures and devices including skyrmions and spin-torque electronics(1-4). Analogous topological structures are now also being explored in…
When a chiral isotropic elastomer is brought to low temperature cholesteric phase, the nematic degree of freedom tends to order and form a helix. Due to the nemato-elastic coupling, this also leads to elastic deformation of the polymer…
We present a minimal Landau theory of plastic-to-crystal phase transitions in which the key components are a multipole-moment order parameter that describes the orientational ordering of the constituent molecules, coupling between such…
We demonstrate the existence of a topological chiral spin liquid in the frustrated Shastry-Sutherland Heisenberg model with an additional spin chirality interaction, using numerically unbiased exact diagonalization and density matrix…
Stiff, elongated biomolecules such as filamentous viruses, DNA or cellulose nanocrystals are known to form liquid crystals often exhibiting a helical supramolecular organization. Little is known about the microscopic origin, size and…
Inverse melting refers to the rare thermodynamic phenomenon in which a solid melts into a liquid upon cooling, a transition that can occur only when the ordered (solid) phase has more entropy than the disordered (liquid) phase, and that has…
We study the structure of the twist grain boundary in chiral smectic liquid crystals using the Landau-de Gennes model. By considering spatial variation of the smectic order, we distinguish the Melted-Grain-Boundary-A (MGBA) structure with…
We consider the spin rotationally invariant Kalmeyer-Laughlin chiral spin liquid (CSL) in systems with broken time-reversal symmetry and explore symmetry constraints on possible conventional spin crystal states accessible via a direct…
Chirality, or the breaking of mirror symmetry, appears across all scales in nature, from molecular conformations to the dynamics of bacterial collectives. Environments composed of such symmetry-breaking constituents can give rise to…
Active hydrodynamic theories are a powerful tool to study the emergent ordered phases of internally driven particles such as bird flocks, bacterial suspension and their artificial analogues. While theories of orientationally ordered phases…
Active cholesterics are chiral in both their structure, which has continuous screw symmetry, and their active stresses, which include contributions from torque dipoles. Both expressions of chirality give rise to curl forces in the…
We study samples and a dipolar model of magnetic rods arranged on twisted polygonal clusters in terms of the twist angle. We find that the relative twist between polygons induces noncollinear chiral phases, ranging from flux vortex closure…
Melting in 2D is described by the celebrated Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young (KTHNY) theory. The unbinding of two different types of topological defects destroys translational and orientational order at different temperatures. The…