Reflection symmetry breaking, liquid crystals

Spontaneous Reflection Symmetry Breaking in Liquid Crystals... 

The author was supported by the Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center (National Science Foundation MRSEC award No. DMR-9809555) during the writing of this chapter. The author thanks Professors Tom Lubensky, Leo Radzihovsky, and Joseph Gal for helpful discussions around the issue of terminology for reflection symmetry breaking, and especially Professor Noel Clark for his help on this and many other banana-phase issues. The author also thanks Dr. Renfan Shao for the photomicrographs shown in Figures 8.32 and 8.33. 

Walba DM, Korblova E, Huang C-C, Shao R, Nakata M, Clark NA (2006) Reflection symmetry breaking in achiral rod-shaped smectic liquid crystals J Am Chem Soc 128 5318-5319... 

So far we have considered the formation of tubules in systems of fixed molecular chirality. It is also possible that tubules might form out of membranes that undergo a chiral symmetry-breaking transition, in which they spontaneously break reflection symmetry and select a handedness, even if they are composed of achiral molecules. This symmetry breaking has been seen in bent-core liquid crystals which spontaneously form a liquid conglomerate composed of macroscopic chiral domains of either handedness.194 This topic is extensively discussed in Walba s chapter elsewhere in this volume. Some indications of this effect have also been seen in experiments on self-assembled aggregates.195,196... 

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