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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Sep 9, 2025

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

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

Published on: October 31, 2019

Geometric frustration in twist-bend nematic droplets.

Joseph Pollard^1,2, Richard G Morris^1,2,3

¹School of Physics, UNSW, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. joe.pollard@unsw.edu.au.

|September 2, 2025

Summary

Confinement in spherical droplets creates complex textures in twist-bend nematic liquid crystals. These exotic materials exhibit unique layered states and defect patterns, distinct from chiral counterparts.

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Area of Science:

Materials Science
Soft Matter Physics

Background:

Bent-core liquid crystals exhibit a unique twist-bend nematic phase.
This phase arises from a balance between bend distortion and molecular twist.
The twist-bend nematic phase shares properties with smectic and cholesteric liquid crystals.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how confinement and boundary anchoring affect the twist-bend nematic phase.
To catalogue metastable textures in spherical twist-bend nematic droplets.
To analyze the influence of molecular cone angle and pitch length to droplet radius ratio on these textures.

Main Methods:

Numerical simulations
Topological analysis
Geometric analysis

Main Results:

Confinement exacerbates frustration in the twist-bend nematic phase.
Spherical droplets exhibit complex layered states, defect constellations, and Hopfions.
Observed structures are geometrically distinct from cholesteric phases due to the absence of chirality.

Conclusions:

Spherical twist-bend nematic droplets display a rich variety of metastable textures under radial anchoring.
The observed complexity is comparable to cholesteric systems but with unique geometric features.
This study provides a catalogue of textures relevant for understanding confined liquid crystal systems.