We present a Monte Carlo molecular simulation method that calculates the helical twisting power of a chiral molecule by sampling intermolecular torques. The approach is applied to an achiral nematic liquid crystalline system, composed of Gay-Berne particles, that is doped with chiral molecules. Calculations are presented for six chiral dopant molecules and the results show a good correlation wi...

Liquid Crystal Phase Transitions of Monodisperse and Bidisperse Suspensions of Rodlike Colloidal Virus A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Kirstin Rachael Purdy We experimentally study the role of steric and electrostatic interparticle interactions in monodisperse and bidisperse suspensions of rodl...

We report a low-voltage and submillisecond-response polymerstabilized hyper-twisted-nematic (HTN) liquid crystal cell with a large dielectric anisotropy host mixture. To correct the measured voltagedependent transmittance, we have to take the voltage shielding effect of the alignment layers into consideration. Both Kerr effect and flexoelectro-optic effect contribute to the observed induced bir...

We study the pattern formation of a chiral nematic liquid crystal under a wetting transition. In the isotropic-liquid crystal transition, a surface-enhanced effect happens and a thin liquid crystal layer forms at the substrates of the cell. In this confined system, chirality, elastic anisotropy, surface anchoring, and wetting strength interplay. A striped pattern is formed due to the chiral nat...

[structure: see text] A new system for the double amplification of the molecular chirality of simple chiral amines in achiral liquid crystalline media is described. It involves a conformationally flexible phosphoric acid based receptor that by binding to chiral amines induces chirality in the liquid crystalline matrix. Efficient cholesteric phase formation was shown by several chiral amines tha...

We present results for chiral extrapolations of the mass and decay constants of the rho meson. The data sets used are the n f =2 unquenched gauge configurations generated with twisted mass fermions by the European Twisted Mass Collaboration. We describe a calculation of three decay constants in charmonium and explain why they are required. Decay constants from twisted mass QCD.

We explore the phase behavior of a rigid achiral bent-core model system. Nematic and smectic phases form at higher densities, whereas micelles and columns composed of chiral clusters of these molecules self-assemble at lower densities. No nucleation mechanism requiring transient chirality is possible in the formation of these chiral superstructures due to the rigid achiral nature of the substit...

I make a number of observations concerning discretization errors in twisted-mass lattice QCD that can be deduced by applying chiral perturbation theory including lattice artifacts. (1) The line along which the PCAC quark mass vanishes in the untwisted mass-twisted mass plane makes an angle to the twisted mass axis which is a direct measure of O(a) terms in the chiral Lagrangian, and is found nu...

This paper reviews the derivation of equations for slow dynamical processes in a variety of systems, including rotating rigid rotors, crystalline solids, isotropic and nematic elastomers, gels in an isotropic fluid background, and nematic liquid crystals. It presents a recent derivation of the Leslie–Ericksen equations for the dynamics of nematic liquid crystals that clarifies the nature of the...