Related papers: Chiral Discotic Columnar Phases in Liquid Crystals
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the…
Ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals are formed by achiral molecules with large dipole moments. Its three-dimensional orientational order is universally described as unidirectionally polar. We demonstrate that the ground state of…
In the hexagonal columnar phase of chiral polymers a bias towards cholesteric twist competes with braiding along an average direction. When the chirality is strong, screw dislocations proliferate, leading to either a tilt grain boundary…
A statistical theory of cholesteric liquid crystals composed of short rigid biaxial molecules is presented. It is derived in the thermodynamic limit at a small density and a small twist. The uniaxial (biaxial) cholesteric phase is regarded…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
We have numerically studied a liquid composed of achiral, bent-shaped molecules built of tangent spheres. The system is known to spontaneously break mirror symmetry, as it forms a macroscopically chiral, twist-bend nematic phase [Phys. Rev.…
We numerically investigate the phase behavior of thick shells of cholesteric liquid crystals with tangential anchoring at the shell boundary. For achiral liquid crystal, we demonstrate a thickness-dependent transition from a configuration…
By Monte Carlo simulations of a soft ellipsoid model for liquid crystals, we study whether a layer of grafted liquid-crystalline chain molecules can induce tilt in a nematic fluid. The chains are fairly short (four monomers) and made of the…
Chromonic liquid crystals are lyotropic nematic phases whose applications span from food to drug industries. It has recently been suggested that the elastic energy density governing the equilibrium distortions of these materials may be…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
We propose a robust platform for simulating chiral quantum magnetism using linear arrays of trapped asymmetric top molecules, specifically 1,2-propanediol ($\mathrm{C_{3}H_{8}O_{2}}$). By mapping the Stark-dressed rotational states onto an…
Recently published preprint (A. Ashkinazi, H.Chhabra, A.El.Moumane, M.M.C.Tortora, J.P.K. Doye, Chirality transfer in lyotropic twist-bend nematics, arXiv:2508.03544v1 (2025)) has reawakened also interest to various mechanisms of chirality…
Many physical systems can be mapped onto solved or "solvable" models of magnetism. In this work, we have mapped the statistical mechanics of columnar phases of ideally helical rigid DNA -- subject to the earlier found unusual, frustrated…
A hexagonal columnar crystal undergoes a shear-melting transition above a critical shear rate or stress. We combine the analysis of the shear-thinning regime below the melting with that of synchrotron X-ray scattering data under shear and…
We study the kinetics of the nematic-isotropic transition in a two-dimensional liquid crystal by using a lattice Boltzmann scheme that couples the tensor order parameter and the flow consistently. Unlike in previous studies, we find the…
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…
We investigate the behavior of colloidal suspensions with different volume fractions confined between parallel walls under a range of steady shears. We model the particles using molecular dynamics (MD) with full hydrodynamic interactions…
Liquid crystals formed by acute-angle bent-core (ABC) molecules with a 1,7 naphthalene central core show an intriguing phase behavior with the nematic phase accompanied by poorly understood additional phases. In this work, we characterize…
A theoretical model of shape-anisometric particles embedded in a cubic lattice is formulated for binary mixtures combining rod-like, plate-like and spherical particles. The model aims at providing a tool for the prediction and…