Related papers: Chirality in Liquid Crystals: from Microscopic Ori…
The interplay between the chirality of many biological molecules and the energy injected at small length-scales as the result of biological processes is at the base of the life of the cells. With the aim of unveiling the connection between…
Cholesteric elastomers possess a macroscopic ``phase chirality'' as the director n rotates in a helical fashion along an optical axis $z$ and can be described by a chiral order parameter. This parameter can be tuned by changing the helix…
Lipid rafts are hypothesized to facilitate protein interaction, tension regulation, and trafficking in biological membranes, but the mechanisms responsible for their formation and maintenance are not clear. Insights into many other…
Crystalline assemblages of identical sub-units packed together and elastically bent in the form of a torus have been found in the past ten years in a variety of systems of surprisingly different nature, such as viral capsids, self-assembled…
A Landau theory is presented for the structural transition of electrically stabilized colloidal crystals under shear. The model suggests that a structural transition from an ordered layered colloidal crystal into a disordered structure…
We study the static properties of cubic blue phases by numerically minimising the three-dimensional, Landau-de Gennes free energy for a cholesteric liquid crystal close to the isotropic-cholesteric phase transition. Thus we are able to…
The transfer of chirality across length-scales is an intriguing and universal natural phenomenon. However, connecting the properties of individual building blocks to the emergent features of their resulting large-scale structure remains a…
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…
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…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
Cholesteric liquid crystals exhibit great morphological richness of static metastable states. Understanding the transitions between such states is key for the development of switchable devices. We show, using a quasi-one-dimensional model,…
This review reports some theoretical results on the Geometry of membranes. The governing equations to describe equilibrium configurations of lipid vesicles, lipid membranes with free edges, and chiral lipid membranes are derived from the…
Liquid crystals are assemblies of rod-like molecules which self-organize to form mesophases, in-between ordinary liquids and anisotropic crystals. At each point, the molecules collectively orient themselves along a privileged direction,…
We use full nematohydrodynamic simulations to study the statics and dynamics of monolayers of cholesteric liquid crystals. Using chirality and temperature as control parameters we show that we can recover the two-dimensional blue phases…
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…
Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) have a characteristic length scale given by the pitch of the twisted stacking of their constituent rod-like molecules. Under homeotropic anchoring conditions where the molecules prefer to orient…
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…
Specific features of the defect modes of cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) with an isotropic defect, as well as their photonic density of states, Q factor, and emission, have been investigated. The effect of the thicknesses of the defect…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
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…