Related papers: Chiral Interactions and Structures
We study the effective chiral interaction between molecules arising from quantum dispersion interactions within a model in which a) the dominant excited states of a molecule form a band whose width is small compared to the average…
Chirality in polymeric systems enables a wide range of emergent optical, mechanical, and transport phenomena, yet a unified framework that quantitatively connects molecular-scale geometry to chiral behavior remains lacking. Existing…
Colloidal crystal structures with complexity and diversity rivaling atomic and molecular crystals have been predicted and obtained for hard particles by entropy maximization. However, so far homochiral colloidal crystals, which are…
Recent experiments on aligned DNA show hexatic order with no sign of macroscopic chirality. I make the analogy between smectic liquid crystals and chiral hexatics and show how the absence of chirality cannot occur in a thermodynamic phase…
Emergence of collective dynamical chirality (CDC) at mesoscopic scales plays a key role in many formation processes of chiral structures in nature, which may also provide possible routines for people to fabricate complex chiral…
Maximum structural chirality refers to the highest selectivity for circularly polarized light (CPL) in nanostructures, often manifested as maximum circular dichroism (CD), optical rotation (OR), and spin-orbit coupling (SOC). However, the…
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…
The article explains on a non-expert level how triaxial rotating nuclei may attain a chiral structure.
Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in nature. Here we introduce a novel…
Molecular chirality has traditionally been viewed as a binary property where a molecule is classified as either chiral or achiral, yet in the recent decades mathematical methods for quantifying chirality have been explored. Here we use toy…
The article seeks to formulate a synergetic law that is posited to be of common physicochemical and biological nature: an evolving system, possessing free energy and elements with chiral asymmetry may change the type of symmetry inside one…
Chirality plays an important role in physics, chemistry, biology, and other fields. It describes an essential symmetry in structure. However, chirality invariants are usually complicated in expression or difficult to evaluate. In this…
Light scattering from chiral plasmonic structures can create near fields with an asymmetry greater than the equivalent circularly polarised light, a property sometimes referred to as superchirality. These near fields with enhanced chiral…
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…
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 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…
Chiral crystals, like chiral molecules, cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images -- a fundamental property that has been linked to interesting physical behavior and exploited in functional devices. Among the simplest inorganic…
We investigate the statistical mechanics of chirality and biaxiality in liquid crystals through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Monte Carlo simulations, lattice mean-field theory, and Landau theory. All of these calculations…
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…
The structure of a molecular liquid, in both the nematic liquid crystalline and isotropic phases, around a cylindrical macroparticle, is studied using density functional theory. In the nematic phase the structure of the fluid is highly…