Related papers: Weak Chirality in Ordered DNA Phases
The possible symmetries of the biaxial nematic phase are examined against the implications of the presently available experimental results. Contrary to the widespread notion that biaxial nematics have orthorhombic symmetry, our study shows…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning the fields of biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic…
Colloidal crystal structures with complexity and diversity rivaling atomic and molecular crystals have been predicted and obtained for hard particles by entropy maximization. However, so far homochiral colloidal crystals, which are…
The chiral state of a molecule plays a crucial role in molecular recognition and biochemical reactions. Because of this and owing to the fact that most modern drugs are chiral, the sensitive and reliable detection of the chirality of…
Chirality is a recurrent theme in the study of biological systems, in which active processes are driven by the internal conversion of chemical energy into work. Bacterial flagella, acto-myosin filaments and microtubule bundles are active…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…
We show that a mesoscale model, with a minimal number of parameters, can well describe the thermomechanical and mechanochemical behavior of homogeneous DNA at thermal equilibrium under tension and torque. We predict critical temperatures…
We study the pattern formation of chiral charges in the presence of reactions. We show that, in contrast to the original Turing's mechanism of pattern formation in diffusion-reaction systems, the interplay between chiral effects and…
We have used an extended Scaled-Particle Theory that incorporates four-body correlations through the fourth-order virial coefficient to analyse the orientational properties of a fluid of hard right-angle triangles. This fluid has been…
The molecules in lyotropic membranes are typically aligned with the surface normal. When these molecules are chiral, there is a tendency for the molecular direction to twist. These competing effects can reach a compromise by producing…
Many bent-core nematic liquid crystals exhibit unusual physical properties due to the presence of smectic clusters, known as "cybotactic" clusters in the nematic phase. Effect of these clusters on complex shear modulus ($G^*(\omega)$) of…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
Under appropriate conditions, mixtures of cationic and neutral lipids and DNA in water condense into complexes in which DNA strands form local 2D smectic lattices intercalated between lipid bilayer membranes in a lamellar stack. These…
Colloidal membranes, self assembled monolayers of aligned rod like molecules, offer a template for designing membranes with definite shapes and curvature, and possibly new functionalities in the future. Often the constituent rods, due to…
The presence of chirality in the main molecules of life may well be not just a structural artifact, but of pure biological advantage. The possibility of the existence of a phenomenon of a special mode of interaction, labeled as "chiral…
Chiral active materials display odd dynamical effects in both their elastic and viscous responses. We show that the most symmetric mesophase with two-dimensional odd elasticity in three dimensions is chiral, polar and columnar, with…
We have investigated the relationship between the morphology of helical particles and the features of the cholesteric (N$^\ast $) phase that they form. Using an Onsager-like theory, applied to systems of hard helices, we show that the…
Systems of elongated molecules, doped with small amounts of molecules lacking mirror symmetry can form macroscopically twisted cholesteric liquid crystal phases. The aim of this work is to rigorously derive the Oseen-Frank model of…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…