Related papers: Chirality in Liquid Crystals: from Microscopic Ori…
The concept of chirality makes ubiquitous appearance in nature. Particularly, both a structure and its collective excitations may acquire well defined chiralities. In this work, we reveal an intrinsic connection between the chiralities of a…
Chiral active materials are those that break both time-reversal symmetry and parity microscopically, which results in average rotation of the material's complex molecules around their center-of-mass (CM). These materials are far from…
It is believed at present that the chiral transition changes from a smooth crossover to a first-order transition at low temperatures and high densities. Such regime is commonly analyzed using effective models since first principle…
Within the framework of continuum theory, we draw a parallel between ferromagnetic materials and nematic liquid crystals confined on curved surfaces, which are both characterized by local interaction and anchoring potentials. We show that…
Membrane-mediated particle interactions depend both on the properties of the particles themselves and the membrane environment in which they are suspended. Experiments have shown that chiral rod-like inclusions dissolved in a colloidal…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
The textures associated with a point defect centered in a circular domain of a thin film with XY-like ordering have been analyzed. The family of equilibrium textures, both stable and metastable, can be classified by a new radial topological…
A variety of physical phenomena can lead to viscous effects. In this talk we review several sources of shear and bulk viscosity with an emphasis on the bulk viscosity associated with chiral restoration. We show that in the limit of a second…
Soft particulate gels include materials we can eat, squeeze, or 3D print. From foods to bio-inks to cement hydrates, these gels are composed of a small amount of particulate matter (proteins, polymers, colloidal particles, or agglomerates…
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…
We study chiral symmetry structure at finite density and temperature in the presence of external magnetic field and gravity, a situation relevant in the early Universe and in the core of compact stars. We then investigate the dynamical…
By molecular modeling we demonstrate that the nematic long-range order discovered in bent-core liquid crystal systems should reveal further spatially homogeneous phases. Two of them are identified as a tetrahedratic nematic ($N_T$) phase…
Nonequilibrium Langmuir monolayers including a fraction of chiral molecules and subject to transmembrane flow are considered. The flow induces coherent collective precession of chiral molecules. Our theoretical study shows that splay…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Chirality is probably the most mysterious among all symmetry transformations. Very readily broken in biological systems, it is practically absent in naturally occurring inorganic materials and is very challenging to create artificially.…
We use confocal microscopy and time-resolved light scattering to investigate plasticity in a col- loidal polycrystal, following the evolution of the network of grain boundaries as the sample is submitted to thousands of shear deformation…
Chirality is a highly important topic in modern chemistry, given the dramatically different pharmacological effects that enantiomers can have on the body. Chirality of natural molecules can be controlled by reconfiguration of molecular…
Symmetry is one of the most beautiful yet mysterious concepts in science. In chemical systems, presence of local symmetries at specific fragments often serve as driving forces behind many physicochemical properties, including stability,…
Crystals and quasicrystals can be characterized by an order that is a purely geometric property of an instantaneous configuration, independent of particle dynamics or interactions. Glasses, on the other hand, are ostensibly amorphous…
A two-dimensional system of soft particles interacting via a two-length-scale potential is studied. Density functional theory and Brownian dynamics simulations reveal a fluid phase and two crystalline phases with different lattice spacing.…