Related papers: Phase chirality and stereo-selective swelling of c…
The hydrodynamic theory of polar liquid crystals is widely used to describe biological active fluids as well as passive molecular materials. Depending on the `shear-alignment parameter', in passive or weakly active polar fluids under…
Most theoretical descriptions of lyotropic cholesteric liquid crystals to date focus on homogeneous systems in which the rod concentration, as opposed to the rod orientation, is uniform. In this work, we build upon the Onsager-Straley…
Chiral twisting of the molecular orientation within the layer of a smectic-A liquid crystal has been investigated using circular dichroism spectroscopy. The results indicate that a rotation of the layers away from the alignment direction is…
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…
We show that the combination of molecular chirality and phase-controlled driving can lead to rectification of vibrational energy transfer. We demonstrate this effect using classical models of (1) a single helical chain and (2) a more…
In quantum mechanics, each conserved quantity (e.g., energy, position, linear momentum and angular momentum) is associated with a Hermitian operator. Its expected value can then be determined by performing a measurement on the wavefunction.…
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…
At the A to C transition, smectic elastomers have recently been observed to undergo $\sim$35% spontaneous shear strains. We first explicitly describe how strains of up to twice this value could be mechanically or electrically induced in…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
We investigate the localized surface modes in a structure consisting of the cholesteric liquid crystal layer, a phase plate, and a metal layer. These modes are analogous to the optical Tamm states. The nonreciprocal transmission of…
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…
Comparative study of thin film Cholesteric Liquid Crystal (CLC) lasers made from different materials and optically pumped by external solid state laser reveals a striking dependence of lasing behaviour (ranging from single mode at the edge…
In a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal, the electrostatic interaction can induce a spontaneous cholesteric helix, even if the material is not chiral. If the liquid-crystal cell is infinitely thick, then the predicted pitch depends…
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,…
General microscopic mechanism of ferroelectric ordering in chiral smectic C* liquid crystals is considered. It is shown that if the mesogenic molecules have a sufficiently low symmetry, the spontaneous polarization is proportional to one of…
We construct phase diagrams for charged rodlike colloids within the second-virial approximation as a function of rod concentration, salt concentration, and colloidal charge. Besides the expected isotropic-nematic transition, we also find…
Effect of a planar texture quality and its thickness on lasing spectrums and thresholds in dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) of steroid type is explored. Transition from the qualitative planar texture to the poor texture quality is…
We propose a continuum tensorial model for chiral smectic C (SmC$^*$) liquid crystals using a tensor-valued order parameter $\mathbf{Q}$ to describe orientational order and a real-valued order parameter $\delta\rho$ to capture layer…
We study the static properties of cubic blue phases by numerically minimising the three-dimensional, Landau-de Gennes free energy for a cholesteric liquid crystal close to the isotropic-cholesteric phase transition. Thus we are able to…
We investigate theoretically the wetting properties of cholesteric liquid crystals at a planar substrate. If the properties of substrate and of the interface are such that the cholesteric layers are not distorted the wetting properties are…