Related papers: Chirality in Liquid Crystals: from Microscopic Ori…

The observation of chirality is ubiquitous in nature. Contrary to intuition, the population of opposite chiralities is surprisingly asymmetric at fundamental levels. Examples range from parity violation in the subatomic weak force to the…

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.…

Topological surface states, a new kind of electronic state of matter, have recently been observed on the cleaved surfaces of crystals of a handful of small band gap semiconductors. The underlying chemical factors that enable these states…

The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth in understanding of the pivotal roles of mechanical stresses and physical forces in cell biology. As a result an integrated view of cell biology is evolving, where genetic and molecular features…

Molecular chirality is conventionally understood as space-inversion-symmetry breaking in the equilibrium structure of molecules. Less well known is that achiral molecules can be made chiral through extreme rotational excitation. Here, we…

We present here a numerical study of a lattice model of a chiral liquid. The low symmetry of the favoured local structure depresses the freezing point to reveal an exotic liquid-liquid transition characterised by the appearance of an…

We model a cholesteric liquid crystal as a planar uniaxial multilayer system, where the orientation of each layer differs slightly from that of the adjacent one. This allows us to analytically simplify the otherwise acutely complicated…

Various possibilities of polar self-organisation in low molar mass nematic, smectic and columnar liquid crystals are discussed with particular focus on the underlying molecular symmetries and interactions. Distinction is made between vector…

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…

Chirality manifests across multiple scales, yielding unique phenomena that break mirror symmetry. In chiral materials, unexpectedly large spin-filtering or photogalvanic effects have been observed even in materials composed of light…

If a surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cell is cooled from the smectic-A to the smectic-C phase, its layers thin causing V-shaped (chevron like) defects to form. These create an energy barrier that can prevent switching…

The skyrmion crystal is a periodic array of a swirling topological spin texture. Since it is regarded as an interference pattern by multiple helical spin density waves, the texture changes with the relative phases among the constituent…

Novel types of barrel-shaped chiral skyrmions can exist as isolated topological defects or as bound states in magnetic nanolayers with intrinsic and surface/interface induced chirality. The equilibrium parameters of chiral modulations…

Recent experiments have found a bent-core liquid crystal in which the layer chirality alternates from layer to layer, giving a racemic or "antichiral" material, even though the molecules are uniformly chiral. To explain this effect, we map…

Chiral crystals and molecules were recently predicted to form an intriguing platform for unconventional orbital physics. Here, we report the observation of chirality-driven orbital textures in the bulk electronic structure of CoSi, a…

Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…

We carry out Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the effect of molecular shape on liquid-crystal order. In our approach, each model mesogen consists of several soft spheres bonded rigidly together. The arrangement of the spheres may be…

We study the effects of chirality at the segment scale on the thermodynamics of block copolymer melts using self consistent field theory. In linear diblock melts where segments of one block prefer a twisted, or cholesteric, texture, we show…

To understand the relationship between the chirality of individual cells and that of tissues and organisms, we have developed a chiral polarized particle model to investigate the movement of cell populations on substrates. Our model…

It is well-known that the architecture of macromolecules plays an important role in the hydrodynamics and viscosity of its semi-diluted solutions. However, the systematic study of the rheology of macromolecules with complex topology, such…