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Unavoidable multilevel biaxial symmetry breaking in chiral hybrid liquid crystals

Jin-Sheng Wu1, Marina Torres Lázaro2, Souvik Ghosh1, Haridas Mundoor1, Henricus H. Wensink2, and Ivan I. Smalyukh1,3,4,5,*

  • *Contact author: ivan.smalyukh@colorado.edu
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Phys. Rev. E 111, 045410 – Published 10 April, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.111.045410

Abstract

Chiral nematic or cholesteric liquid crystals (LCs) are fluid mesophases with long-ranged orientational order featuring a quasilayered periodicity imparted by a helical director configuration but lacking long-range positional order. Doping molecular cholesteric LCs with strongly anisotropic uniaxial colloidal particles adds another level of complexity because of the interplay between weak surface-anchoring boundary conditions and bulk-based elastic distortions near the particle-LC interface. Using cylindrical colloidal disks and rods with different geometric shapes and surface conditions, we demonstrate that these colloidal inclusions generically exhibit biaxial orientational probability distributions which may impart anomalously strong local biaxiality onto the hybrid cholesteric LC structure. Unlike nonchiral hybrid molecular-colloidal LCs, where biaxial order emerges only at critical colloid volume fractions exceeding some uniaxial-biaxial transition value, the orientational probability of the colloidal inclusions immersed in chiral nematic hosts is unambiguously biaxial even at infinite dilution. We demonstrate that the colloids induce local biaxial perturbations within the molecular orientational order of the LC host medium which strongly enhances the weak but native biaxial order of chiral nematic LC induced by the chiral symmetry breaking of the director field. With the help of analytical modeling and computer simulations based on the Landau–de Gennes free energy of the host LC around the colloids, we rationalize the observed multilevel biaxial order and conclude that it is not only unavoidable but also strongly enhanced compared to both achiral hybrid LCs and purely molecular cholesteric LCs.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. E 111, 045410– Published 10 April, 2025
  • Received 14 April 2023
  • Revised 17 March 2025
  • Accepted 25 March 2025
Article part of CHORUS
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