On the Microscopic Origin of Cholesteric Pitch

Abstract

We present a microscopic analysis of the instability of the nematic phase to chirality when molecular chirality is introduced perturbatively. We show that previously neglected short-range biaxial correlations play a crucial role in determining the cholesteric pitch. We propose an order parameter which quantifies the chirality of a molecule.

RevTeX 3.0, 4 pages, one included eps figure. Published version

References in corpus (1)

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