Issue 6, 2023

Hidden traces of chirality in the fluctuations of a fully unwound cholesteric

Abstract

Confinement and hydrodynamic interactions often play an important role in the fluctuation dynamics of soft matter systems, which can typically be studied using light scattering techniques. With experimental and theoretical methodologies, I demonstrate here that chirality is an additional critical parameter that leads to diverging decay times and correlation lengths in chiral liquid crystal cells with a fully unwound cholesteric helix. This study combines light scattering measurements made in a tailored microscope geometry and theoretical calculations of the decay dynamics of chiral orientational fluctuations—including hydrodynamics—to establish the existence of two soft chiral modes of fluctuations driving the destabilization of the unwound cholesteric. Despite the achirality of the equilibrium state of unwound cholesterics, this study indicates that chirality hides itself in the orientational fluctuation modes and plays a major role in their dynamics, which can be exploited to locally measure the strength of chirality in frustrated chiral liquid crystal cells.

Graphical abstract: Hidden traces of chirality in the fluctuations of a fully unwound cholesteric

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
16 Ker. 2022
Accepted
19 Gen. 2023
First published
20 Gen. 2023

Soft Matter, 2023,19, 1115-1130

Hidden traces of chirality in the fluctuations of a fully unwound cholesteric

G. Poy, Soft Matter, 2023, 19, 1115 DOI: 10.1039/D2SM01646J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements