Helical buckling in columnar assemblies of soft discotic mesogens

TL;DR

This paper explores how chiral helical structures spontaneously form in columnar assemblies of discotic particles due to internal stresses, soft repulsions, and confinement, with theoretical scaling laws derived.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field theoretical framework to predict the buckling radius and pitch based on particle density and interactions in soft discotic mesogen assemblies.

Findings

Helical undulations emerge spontaneously from internal stresses.

Scaling laws for buckling radius and pitch are derived.

Chiral structures are stabilized by soft repulsions and confinement.

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of chiral meso-structures in one-dimensional fluids consisting of stacked discotic particles and demonstrate that helical undulations are generated spontaneously from internal elastic stresses. The stability of these helical conformations arises from an interplay between long-ranged soft repulsions and nanopore confinement which is naturally present in columnar liquid crystals. Using a simple mean-field theory based on microscopic considerations we identify generic scaling expressions for the typical buckling radius and helical pitch as a function of the density and interaction potential of the constituent particles.