Density Functional Theory for Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystals

Abstract

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 means of a novel density functional theory for the equilibrium pitch of chiral particles. When applied to right-handed hard helices, our theory predicts an entropy-driven cholesteric phase, which can be either right- or left-handed, depending not only on the particle shape but also on the thermodynamic state. We explain the origin of the chiral ordering as an interplay between local nematic alignment and excluded-volume differences between left- and right-handed particle pairs.

References in corpus (2)

• From rods to helices: evidence of a screw-like nematic phase
• Left or right cholesterics? A matter of helix handedness and curliness

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Cholesterics of colloidal helices: Predicting the macroscopic pitch from the particle shape and thermodynamic state
• Cholesteric and screw-like nematic phases in systems of helical particles
• Connectedness percolation of hard deformed rods
• Hierarchical bounding structures for efficient virial computations: Towards a realistic molecular description of cholesterics
• Nanocellulose Fragmentation Mechanisms and Inversion of Chirality from the Single Particle to the Cholesteric Phase