Chiral liquid crystal colloids
arXiv:1712.09971 · doi:10.1038/nmat5032
Abstract
Colloidal particles disturb the alignment of rod-like molecules of liquid crystals, giving rise to long-range interactions that minimize the free energy of distorted regions. Particle shape and topology are known to guide this self-assembly process. However, how chirality of colloidal inclusions affects these long-range interactions is unclear. Here we study the effects of distortions caused by chiral springs and helices on the colloidal self-organization in a nematic liquid crystal using laser tweezers, particle tracking and optical imaging. We show that chirality of colloidal particles interacts with the nematic elasticity to predefine chiral or racemic colloidal superstructures in nematic colloids. These findings are consistent with numerical modelling based on the minimization of Landau-de Gennes free energy. Our study uncovers the role of chirality in defining the mesoscopic order of liquid crystal colloids, suggesting that this feature may be a potential tool to modulate the global orientated self-organization of these systems.
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Cited by in corpus (9)
- Self-Assembled Chiral Photonic Crystals From Colloidal Helices Racemate
- Relations between angular and Cartesian orientational expansions
- Orientational order parameters for arbitrary quantum systems
- Complex-tensor theory of simple smectics
- Colloidal interactions and unusual crystallization versus de-mixing of elastic multipoles formed by gold mesoflowers
- Network topology of interlocked chiral particles
- Chiral, Topological, and Knotted Colloids in Liquid Crystals
- Unavoidable emergent biaxiality in chiral molecular-colloidal hybrid liquid crystals
- Thin Pyramidal Cones in Nematic Liquid Crystal