Related papers: Chirality in Liquid Crystals: from Microscopic Ori…
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, topological defects proliferate, leading to either a tilt grain boundary…
Molecular chirality is critical to biochemical function, but it is unknown when chiral selectivity first became important in the evolutionary transition from geochemistry to biochemistry during the emergence of life. Here, we identify key…
Chiral nanostructures offer the ability to respond to the vector nature of a light beam at the nanoscale. While naturally chiral materials offer a path towards scalability, engineered structures offer a path to wavelength tunability through…
We give a topological classification of defect lines in cholesteric liquid crystals using methods from contact topology. By focusing on the role played by the chirality of the material, we demonstrate a fundamental distinction between…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Topology, a well-established concept in mathematics, has nowadays become essential to describe condensed matter. At its core are chiral electron states on the bulk, surfaces and edges of the condensed matter systems, in which spin and…
Even though chiral nematic phases were the first liquid crystals experimentally observed more than a century ago, the origin of the thermodynamic stability of cholesteric states is still unclear. In this Letter we address the problem by…
Using tools and concepts from contact topology we show that non-vanishing twist implies conservation of the layer structure in cholesteric liquid crystals. This leads to a number of additional topological invariants for cholesteric…
Understanding how nanostructure and nanomechanics influence physical material properties on the micro- and macroscale is an essential goal in soft condensed matter research. Mechanisms governing fragmentation and chirality inversion of…
Chirality is an intriguing property of certain molecules, materials or artificial nanostructures, which allows them to interact with the spin angular momentum of the impinging light field. Due to their chiral geometry, they can distinguish…
During the early developmental process of organisms, the formation of the left-right laterality requires a subtle mechanism, as it is associated with other principal body axes. Any inherent chiral feature in an egg cell can in principal…
We develop a theory of point defects in cholesterics and textures in spherical droplets with normal anchoring. The local structure of chiral defects is described by singularity theory and a smectic-like gradient field establishing a nexus…
Nuclei of ordered materials emerging from the isotropic state usually show a shape topologically equivalent to a sphere; the well-known examples are crystals and nematic liquid crystal droplets. In this work, we explore experimentally and…
Self-organisation into spatially modulated structures has different nature from phase transition into uniform states. Skyrmions and half-skyrmions (merons) are representatives of such structures and are utilised in designing…
We present a general theory for the equilibrium structure of cylindrical tubules and helical ribbons of chiral lipid membranes. This theory is based on a continuum elastic free energy that permits variations in the direction of molecular…
Structural chirality plays an important role in solid state physics and leads to a variety of novel physics. The feasibility of probing structural chirality of crystals using high harmonic generation in solids is explored in this work.…
The generation of chiral laser emission offers promising opportunities for modern photonic applications and the study of chiral light-mater interactions. Despite the great process made in recent years, the direct generation of chiral lasers…