Chirality and biaxiality in cholesteric liquid crystals

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2011 Feb;83(2 Pt 1):020702. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.83.020702. Epub 2011 Feb 28.

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, that is, 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.