Unavoidable emergent biaxiality in chiral molecular-colloidal hybrid liquid crystals
Résumé
Chiral nematic or cholesteric liquid crystals (LCs) are chiral mesophases with long-ranged ori- entational order featuring a quasi-layered periodicity imparted by a helical director configuration but lacking positional order. Doping molecular cholesteric LCs with thin colloidal rods with a large length-to-width ratio or disks with a large diameter-to-thickness ratio adds another level of complex- ity to the system because of the interplay between weak surface anchoring boundary conditions and bulk-based elastic distortions around the particle-LC interface. By using colloidal disks and rods with different geometric shapes and boundary conditions, we demonstrate that these anisotropic col- loidal inclusions exhibit biaxial orientational probability distributions, where they have tendencies to orient with the long rod axes and disk normals perpendicular to the helix axis, thus imparting strong local biaxiality on the hybrid cholesteric LC structure. Unlike the situation in non-chiral hybrid molecular-colloidal LCs, where biaxial order emerges only at modest to high volume frac- tions of the anisotropic colloidal particles, above a uniaxial-biaxial transition concentration, the orientational probability distribution of colloidal inclusions immersed in chiral nematic hosts are unavoidably biaxial even at vanishingly low particle volume fractions. In addition, the colloidal inclusions induce local biaxiality in the molecular orientational order of the LC host medium, which enhances the weak biaxiality of the LC in a chiral nematic phase coming from the symmetry break- ing caused by the presence of the helical axis. With the help of analytical modeling and computer simulations based on minimizing the Landau de Gennes free energy of the host LC around the col- loidal inclusions, we explain our experimental findings and conclude that the biaxial order of chiral molecular-colloidal LCs is strongly enhanced as compared to both achiral molecular-colloidal LCs and molecular cholesteric LCs and is rather unavoidable.
Domaines
Matière Molle [cond-mat.soft]Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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