Related papers: On the Microscopic Origin of Cholesteric Pitch
Chirality, ubiquitous in complex biological systems, can be controlled and quantified in synthetic materials such as cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) systems. In this work, we study spherical shells of CLC under weak anchoring conditions.…
In photoelectron circular dichroism (PECD) it is generally difficult to trace how and when the chirality of the molecule is imprinted onto the photoelectron. We present simulations of PECD in a simple model and employ chirality measures to…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
In this study, we apply the monitoring master equation describing decoherence of internal states to an optically active molecule prepared in a coherent superposition of nondegenerate internal states interacting with thermal photons at low…
The degree of randomness, or partial order, present in two-dimensional supramolecular arrays of isophthalate tetracarboxylic acids is shown to vary due to subtle chemical changes such as the choice of solvent or small differences in…
Chirality in shape and motility can evolve rapidly in microbes and cancer cells. To determine how chirality affects cell fitness, we developed a model of chiral growth in compact aggregates such as microbial colonies and solid tumors. Our…
We present a theoretical study of director fields in toroidal geometries with degenerate planar boundary conditions. We find spontaneous chirality: despite the achiral nature of nematics the director configuration show a handedness if the…
Molecular chirality is a geometric property that is of great importance in chemistry, biology, and medicine. Recently, plasmonic nanostructures that exhibit distinct chiroptical responses have attracted tremendous interest, given their…
So-called polar liquid crystals possess spontaneous long-range mutual orientation of their electric dipole moments, conferring bulk polarity to fluid phases of matter. The combination of polarity and fluidity leads to complex phase…
An intermediate nematic phase is proposed for the interpretation of recent experimental results on phase biaxiality in bent-core nematics. The phase is macroscopically uniaxial but consists of microscopic biaxial, and possibly polar,…
Molecular chirality plays fundamental roles in biology. The chiral response of a molecule occurs at a specific spectral position, determined by its molecular structure. This fingerprint can be transferred to other spectral regions via the…
We measure and compare three correlation lengths proposed to describe the extent of structural order in amorphous systems. In particular, the recently proposed "patch correlation length" is measured as a function of temperature and…
Partially phase-separated liquid-crystal/polymer dispersions display highly fibrillar domain morphologies that are dramatically different from the typical structures found in isotropic mixtures. To explain this, we numerically explore the…
Molecular chirality plays a crucial role in innumerable biological processes. The chirality of a molecule can typically be identified by its characteristic optical response, the circular dichroism (CD). CD signals have thus long been used…
Anisotropic colloidal particles have the ability to self-assemble into cholesteric structures. We used molecular dynamics to simulate the self-assembly of ellipsoidal particles with the objective to establish a general framework to reveal…
In continuum mechanics, the non-centrosymmetric micropolar theory is usually used to capture the chirality inherent in materials. However when reduced to a two dimensional (2D) isotropic problem, the resulting model becomes non-chiral.…
We explore the role of molecular vibrations in the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect in the context of charge transport through a molecular nanojunction. We employ a mixed quantum-classical approach that combines Ehrenfest…
The shearing instability of a dilute granular mixture composed of smooth inelastic hard spheres or disks is investigated. By using the Navier-Stokes hydrodynamic equations, it is shown that the scaled transversal velocity mode exhibits a…
Chirality ubiquitously appears in nature, however, its quantification remains obscure owing to the lack of microscopic description at the quantum-mechanical level. We propose a way of evaluating chirality in terms of electric toroidal…
This paper is concerned with the dynamics of a binary mixture of rod--like, repulsive colloidal particles driven out of equilibrium by means of a steady shear flow (Couette geometry). To this end we first derive, starting from a microscopic…