Related papers: Chiral twist-bend liquid crystals
Polymeric particles are strong candidates for designing artificial materials capable of emulating the complex twisting-based functionality observed in biological systems. In this letter, we provide the first detailed investigation of the…
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…
The nonlinear elastic properties of nematic liquid crystals have acquired new interest with the recent experimental observation of bulk modulated nematic phases which are composed by achiral molecules. We extend the Oseen-Zocher-Frank's…
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…
We study the phase diagram of director structures in cholesteric liquid crystals of negative dielectric anisotropy in homeotropic cells of thickness d which is smaller than the cholesteric pitch p. The basic control parameters are the…
A systematic computational and scaling analysis of defect textures in polygonal arrangement of cylindrical particles embedded in a cholesteric (Ch) liquid crystal matrix is performed using the Landau de Gennes model for chiral self…
The anchoring of nematic liquid crystals on surfaces with grafted liquid crystalline chain molecules is studied by computer simulations and within a mean field approach. The computer simulations show that a swollen layer of collectively…
Magnetometry measurements in high quality LiFeAs single-crystals reveal a change in the sign of the magnetic hysteresis in the vicinity of the upper critical field $H_{c2}$, from a clear diamagnetic response dominated by the pinning of…
Using an exact solution for the pair interaction potential, we show that long, rigid, chiral molecules with helical surface charge patterns have a preferential interaxial angle ~((RH)^1/2)/L, where L is the length of the molecules, R is the…
We study the equilibrium arrangements of polarization vortices in (PbTiO$_3$)$_n$/(SrTiO$_3$)$_n$ superlattices by means of second-principles simulations. We find that, at low temperatures, polarization vortices organize in a regular…
In this study, we aim to explore the effect of chirality on the phase behavior of active helical particles driven by two-temperature scalar activity. We first calculate the equation of state of soft helical particles of various intrinsic…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
It is demonstrated by analyzing real examples that phase transitions in layered crystals occur like all other solid-state phase transitions by nucleation and crystal growth, but have a specific morphology. There the nucleation is epitaxial,…
We present a general theory of liquid crystals under inhomogeneous electric field in a Ginzburg-Landau scheme. The molecular orientation can be deformed by electric field when the dielectric tensor is orientation-dependent. We then…
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…
Using molecular dynamics simulation we have investigated the influence of random pinning on the phase diagram and melting scenarios of a two-dimensional (2D) system with the Hertz potential for $\alpha=5/2$. For the first time it has been…
The observation of chirality is ubiquitous in nature. Contrary to intuition, the population of opposite chiralities is surprisingly asymmetric at fundamental levels. Examples range from parity violation in the subatomic weak force to the…
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 study the flow behaviour of a twist-bend nematic $(N_{TB})$ liquid crystal. It shows three distinct shear stress ($\sigma$) responses in a certain range of temperatures and shear rates ($\dot{\gamma}$). In Region-I,…
Topological chiral phases are ubiquitous in the physics of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. Non-chiral topological spin liquids are also well known. Here, using the framework of projected entangled pair states (PEPS), we construct a…