title: Helical buckling in columnar assemblies of soft discotic mesogens.
abstract: We investigate the emergence of chiral meso-structures in one-dimensional fluids consisting of stacked discotic particles and demonstrate that helical undulations are generated spontaneously from internal elastic stresses. The stability of these helical conformations arises from an interplay between long-ranged soft repulsions and nanopore confinement which is naturally present in columnar liquid crystals. Using a simple mean-field theory based on microscopic considerations we identify generic scaling expressions for the typical buckling radius and helical pitch as a function of the density and interaction potential of the constituent particles.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physique des Solides - UMR 8502, Université Paris-Sud & CNRS, F-91405 Orsay, France.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Morales-Anda
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physique des Solides - UMR 8502, Université Paris-Sud & CNRS, F-91405 Orsay, France.
authors.forename: H H
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Wensink
mesh_terms: D050866:Liquid Crystals / Q000737:chemistry*; D055595:Mechanical Phenomena; D008958:Models, Molecular; D008968:Molecular Conformation; D058608:Nanopores; D013237:Stereoisomerism; D013816:Thermodynamics