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.

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• Hard competition: stabilizing the elusive biaxial nematic phase in suspensions of colloidal particles with extreme lengths
• Phase diagrams of charged colloidal rods: can a uniaxial charge distribution break chiral symmetry?
• Cholesteric and screw-like nematic phases in systems of helical particles
• Connectedness percolation of hard deformed rods
• Chiral assembly of weakly curled hard rods: effect of steric chirality and polarity
• Perturbative density functional methods for cholesteric liquid crystals
• The effect of flexibility and bend angle on the phase diagram of hard colloidal boomerangs
• Hierarchical bounding structures for efficient virial computations: Towards a realistic molecular description of cholesterics
• The Thermodynamic Origins of Chiral Twist in Monolayer Assemblies of Hard Rod-like Colloids
• $\Gamma$-convergence of a mean-field model of a chiral doped nematic liquid crystal to the Oseen-Frank description of cholesterics
• Phase Separation in Mixtures of Nematic and Isotropic Fluids
• Nanocellulose Fragmentation Mechanisms and Inversion of Chirality from the Single Particle to the Cholesteric Phase