Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 22, 2026

Measuring Magnetically-Tuned Ferroelectric Polarization in Liquid Crystals
07:03

Measuring Magnetically-Tuned Ferroelectric Polarization in Liquid Crystals

Published on: August 15, 2018

Chiral symmetry breaking in bent-core liquid crystals

Lech Longa1, Grzegorz Pajak, Thomas Wydro

  • 1Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics, Department of Statistical Physics and Mark Kac Center for Complex Systems Research, Jagiellonian University, Reymonta 4, Kraków, Poland. lech.longa@uj.edu.pl

Physical Review. E, Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
|June 13, 2009
PubMed

More Related Videos

High-Contrast and Fast Photorheological Switching of a Twist-Bend Nematic Liquid Crystal06:24

High-Contrast and Fast Photorheological Switching of a Twist-Bend Nematic Liquid Crystal

Published on: October 31, 2019

An Electrochemical Cholesteric Liquid Crystalline Device for Quick and Low-Voltage Color Modulation10:33

An Electrochemical Cholesteric Liquid Crystalline Device for Quick and Low-Voltage Color Modulation

Published on: February 27, 2019

Related Concept Videos

Chirality02:25

Chirality

Chirality is a term that describes the lack of mirror symmetry in an object. In other words, chiral objects cannot be superposed on their mirror images. For example, our feet are chiral, as the mirror image of the left foot, the right foot, cannot be superposed on the left foot.
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...
Chirality in Nature02:30

Chirality in Nature

Chirality is the most intriguing yet essential facet of nature, governing life’s biochemical processes and precision. It can be observed from a snail shell pattern in a macroscopic world to an amino acid, the minutest building block of life. Most of the snails around the world have right-coiled shells because of the intrinsic chirality in their genes. All the amino acids present in the human body exist in an enantiomerically pure state, except for glycine - the sole achiral amino acid. The...
Unsymmetric Bending01:18

Unsymmetric Bending

Unsymmetrical bending occurs when the bending moment applied to a structural member does not align with its principal axis. This misalignment leads to complex stress distributions and deflection patterns that differ from those in symmetrical bending, and are essential for designing structures to withstand different loading conditions. In unsymmetrical bending, the neutral axis—where stress is zero—does not necessarily align with the geometric axes of the cross-section. The orientation of the...
Symmetry Elements in a Crystal01:27

Symmetry Elements in a Crystal

Crystal symmetry operations are isometric transformations that map objects onto indistinguishable copies while preserving distances, angles, and volumes. The simplest symmetry operation is translation, which shifts the entire infinite crystal lattice parallelly by a translation vector.Crystallographic rotations involve rotations by an angle of 2π/n around an axis without changing the positions of points on the axis. It is called the rotational axis of the symmetry, denoted by n. The combination...
Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers02:25

Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers

Molecules that possess multiple chiral centers can afford a large number of stereoisomers. For instance, while some molecules like 2-butanol have one chiral center, defined as a tetrahedral carbon atom with four different substituents attached, several molecules like butane-2,3-diol have multiple chiral centers. A simple formula to predict the number of stereoisomers possible for a molecule with n chiral centers is 2n. However, there can be a lower number where some of the stereoisomers are...
Prochirality02:05

Prochirality

The concept of prochirality leads to the nomenclature of the individual faces of a molecule and plays a crucial role in the enantioselective reaction. It is a concept where two or more achiral molecules react to produce chiral products. A typical process is the reaction of an achiral ketone to generate a chiral alcohol. Here, the achiral reactant reacts with an achiral reducing agent, sodium borohydride, to generate an equimolar mixture of the chiral enantiomers of the product. For example, an...