Computer simulation study of novel chiral liquid crystal phases

Abstract

We report a computer simulation study of the phase transitional behavior of a system of chiral Gay-Berne molecules embedded with a terminal dipole. In this Rapid Communication, coarse-grained modeling is done to study the influence of coupled chiral and dipolar interactions on the macroscopic liquid crystalline phase behavior. This NVT molecular dynamics simulation study presents the formation of the smectic blue phase (BP_{Sm}), which is a comparatively recent experimentally discovered chiral phase. Our study reveals that a gradual increment of the strength of the chiral interaction brings conventional cholesteric and blue phases, whereas the addition of a dipolar interaction can induce the smectic blue phase. Moreover, we demonstrate that a further increase of dipolar strength makes novel chiral bilayer phases feasible, yet to be realized experimentally.