Emergent biaxiality in chiral hybrid liquid crystals - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Nature Communications Année : 2024

Emergent biaxiality in chiral hybrid liquid crystals

Résumé

Biaxial nematic liquid crystals are fascinating systems sometimes referred to as the Higgs boson of soft matter because of experimental observation challenges. Here we describe unexpected states of matter that feature biaxial orientational order of colloidal supercritical fluids and gases formed by sparse rodlike particles. Colloidal rods with perpendicular surface boundary conditions exhibit a strong biaxial symmetry breaking when doped into conventional chiral nematic fluids. Minimization of free energy prompts these particles to orient perpendicular to the local molecular director and the helical axis, thereby imparting biaxiality on the hybrid molecular-colloidal system. The ensuing phase diagram features colloidal gas and liquid and supercritical colloidal fluid states with long-range biaxial orientational symmetry, as supported by analytical and numerical modeling at all hierarchical levels of ordering. Unlike for nonchiral hybrid systems, dispersions in chiral nematic hosts display biaxial orientational order at vanishing colloid volume fractions, promising both technological and fundamental research utility.
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Dates et versions

hal-04804928 , version 1 (26-11-2024)

Identifiants

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Jin-Sheng Wu, Marina Torres Lázaro, Haridas Mundoor, Henricus Herman Wensink, Ivan Smalyukh. Emergent biaxiality in chiral hybrid liquid crystals. Nature Communications, 2024, 15 (1), pp.9941. ⟨10.1038/s41467-024-54236-8⟩. ⟨hal-04804928⟩
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