Chirality and Biaxiality in Cholesteric Liquid Crystals

TL;DR

This paper explores how chirality and biaxiality interact in cholesteric liquid crystals, revealing that twist and biaxial order influence each other, with implications for experimental testing.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework showing the mutual influence of twist and biaxiality in chiral liquid crystals, supported by multiple modeling approaches.

Findings

Twist acts as a field on biaxial order.

Biaxial order increases the twist, reducing the pitch.

Model predictions can be tested experimentally.

Abstract

We investigate the statistical mechanics of chirality and biaxiality in liquid crystals through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Monte Carlo simulations, lattice mean-field theory, and Landau theory. All of these calculations show that there is an important interaction between cholesteric twist and biaxial order: The twist acts as a field on the biaxial order, and conversely, the biaxial order increases the twist, i.e. reduces the pitch. We model the behavior of chiral biaxial liquid crystals as a function of temperature, and discuss how the predictions can be tested in experiments.