Related papers: Anomalous Elasticity of Polymer Cholesterics
We present a microscopic analysis of the instability of the nematic phase to chirality when molecular chirality is introduced perturbatively. We show that previously neglected short-range biaxial correlations play a crucial role in…
Many nanoparticle-based chiral liquid crystals are composed of polydisperse rod-shaped particles with considerable spread in size or shape, affecting the mesoscale chiral properties in, as yet, unknown ways. Using an algebraic…
Polymers at the interface exhibit frustrated chain conformation distinct from the bulk, impacting particle dispersion and properties of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs). Utilizing bimodal molecular weight (MW) PNCs, we observed unusual chain…
The critical incompatibility of polymers with different compositions scales inversely with their length. For instance, a mixture of A and B homopolymers of length $N$ segregates at $\chi_{AB}^{cr} = 2/N$. But what if the difference between…
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 theoretically investigate the pitch of lyotropic cholesteric phases composed of slender rods with steric chirality transmitted via a weak helical deformation of the backbone. In this limit, the model is amenable to analytical treatment…
B-DNA solutions of suitable concentration form left-handed chiral nematic phases (cholesterics). Such phases have also been observed in solutions of other stiff or semiflexible chiral polymers; magnitude and handedness of the cholesteric…
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…
Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) have a characteristic length scale given by the pitch of the twisted stacking of their constituent rod-like molecules. Under homeotropic anchoring conditions where the molecules prefer to orient…
Cholesteric elastomers possess a macroscopic ``phase chirality'' as the director n rotates in a helical fashion along an optical axis $z$ and can be described by a chiral order parameter. This parameter can be tuned by changing the helix…
A new scheme for enantiomer differentiation of chiral molecules using a pair of linearly polarized intense ultrashort laser pulses with skewed mutual polarization is presented. The technique relies on the fact that the off-diagonal…
We use an off-lattice microscopic model for solutions of equilibrium polymers (EP) in a lamellar shear flow generated by means of a self-consistent external field between parallel hard walls. The individual conformations of the chains are…
The fundamental issues of symmetry related to chirality are discussed and applied to simple situations relevant to liquid crystals. We show that any chiral measure of a geometric object is a pseudoscalar (invariant under proper rotations…
We consider theoretically the properties of piezoelectricity in cholesteric elastomers. We deduce using symmetry considerations the piezoelectric contributions to the free energy in the context of a coarse-grained description of the…
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…
Building a general theoretical framework to describe the microscopic origin of macroscopic chirality in (colloidal) liquid crystals is a long-standing challenge. Here, we combine classical density functional theory with Monte Carlo…
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…
We study the charmonium dissociation in a strongly coupled chiral plasma in the presence of magnetic field and axial charge imbalance. This type of plasma carries "anomalous flow" induced by the chiral anomaly and exhibits novel transport…
The radius of gyration of a polymer chain immersed in a low molecular weight solvent is known to vary monotonically with the solvent quality. Here, we consider the behavior of a chain immersed in a high molecular weight solvent (polymer…
The practical applications of chiral discrimination are usually limited by the weak chiral response of enantiomers and the high complexity of detection methods. Here, we propose to use the C lines (i.e., lines of polarization singularities)…