Left or right cholesterics? A matter of helix handedness and curliness

Abstract

We have investigated the relationship between the morphology of helical particles and the features of the cholesteric (N${}^{\ast }$) phase that they form. Using an Onsager-like theory, applied to systems of hard helices, we show that the cholesteric handedness and pitch depend on both the pitch and the curliness of the particles. The theory leads to the definition of pseudoscalars that correlate the helical features of the phase to the chirality of the excluded volume of the constituent particles.

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• Density Functional Theory for Chiral Nematic Liquid Crystals
• Chiral Self-Assembly of Helical Particles
• Chiral shape fluctuations and the origin of chirality in cholesteric phases of DNA origamis
• Self-Assembled Chiral Photonic Crystals From Colloidal Helices Racemate
• Cholesteric and screw-like nematic phases in systems of helical particles
• Elucidating chirality transfer in liquid crystals of viruses
• Incorporating particle flexibility in a density functional description of nematics and cholesterics
• Chiral assembly of weakly curled hard rods: effect of steric chirality and polarity
• Perturbative density functional methods for cholesteric liquid crystals
• 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
• Chirality transfer in lyotropic twist-bend nematics