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We investigated the steady unidirectional rotation of cholesteric (Ch) droplets driven by a heat flux. The droplets coexisted with the isotropic (Iso) phase and possessed a helical molecular arrangement. When a heat flux was transported along the helical axis, the droplets and their dumbbell-shaped aggregates exhibited steady rigid rotation. Our results are in contrast with those of previous reports in which Ch droplets in the same geometry exhibited pure director rotation. The fact that Ch droplets and their aggregates prefer rigid rotation can be ascribed to the orientational elasticity combined with the anchoring force at the Ch-Iso interface, which locks the director to the rotational flow in the droplets.

We succeeded in driving the unidirectional rigid-body rotation of cholesteric (Ch) double-twist cylinder (DTC) droplets under a heat flux along the cylindrical symmetry axis. To directly observe the rigid-body rotation of DTC droplets, in each of which the center of the rotation and the symmetry axis of the structure correspond, we fabricated DTC aggregates that comprise several DTCs with intact structures. Given a steady heat flux, the DTC aggregates metastabilized by the shape and the surface anchoring show a unidirectional rigid-body rotation with a constant angular velocity. The rotational direction is determined by the molecular chirality and the direction of the heat flux, and the rotational velocity increases with the temperature gradient and decreases with the aggregation number N of the DTCs as 1 + 2/sin2(π/N). The behavior agrees with a simple model based on the linear phenomenological equation.

We investigated the novel photo-induced dynamics of azobenzene-doped cholesteric (Ch) droplets coexisting with the isotropic (Iso) phase. When the hemispherical Ch droplets initially stuck to glass substrates were irradiated by UV-light, they were parted from the substrates due to the surface disordering caused by the photo-isomerization of azobenzene. Then, the spherical droplets floating in the Iso phase exhibited an unexpected motion - a continuous and unidirectional rotation along the light propagation direction. The rotational direction was reversed by the inversion of either the sample's chirality or the UV irradiation direction, and the rotational velocity increased with both the UV-light intensity and the concentration of the doped azobenzene, the dependences of which were described by linear and relaxation functions, respectively. We proposed a possible scenario based on Leslie's theory combining mass fluxes and torques, which well explained the photo-driven rotation of the Ch droplets.

We revealed the detailed structures of induced smectic liquid crystal (LC) phases composed of a binary mixture of charge-transfer (CT) LC substances. Although neither of the constituents had highly ordered smectic phases, the mixture exhibited smectic-E (SmE) or smectic-B (SmB) phases when mixed at ratios of 1 : 1 and 2 : 3, respectively. The results of polarized optical microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, and infrared spectroscopy indicated that the induced smectic phases were stabilized by an exquisite balance between the CT interactions, dipolar interactions, and excluded volume effects. We proposed a possible model for the molecular arrangements in the SmE and SmB phases, which consistently explained the experimental results including the stoichiometric ratios.

We found for the first time the stabilization of a double twisted structure in cholesteric liquid crystals confined to small spherical droplets under weak anchoring conditions. The direct observation of the droplets using a polarized microscope revealed the physical properties of the structure. The experimental results showed that the stability of the double twisted structure is determined by the relationship between the helical pitch length and the droplet size. We theoretically analyzed the structural stability by the calculation of the Frank elastic free energy including the surface elastic term, and succeeded in explaining the experimental results. In this paper, we concluded that the stability of the double twisted structure is determined by the competition between the surface and the bulk elasticity.

When a chiral liquid crystal is given a transport current, a unidirectional molecular motion is known to take place, which is called the Lehmann effect. In this paper, we study the mysterious heat-current-driven Lehmann effect using two types of hemispherical cholesteric droplets using polarizing, reflecting, confocal and fluorescent microscopies. Both the droplets, coexisting with the isotropic phase and contacting on a glass substrate, are characterized by the concavo-convex modulated surface and the inside orientational helix. Further, the only difference between them is the helical axis direction; i.e., one is perpendicular and the other is parallel to the substrate. Under the temperature gradient perpendicular to the substrate, the droplet whose helical axis is parallel to the heat current exhibited pure director rotation, while that with the axis perpendicular to the current rotated independently as a rigid body. In the two droplets, the rotational conversion efficiency from the temperature gradient into the angular velocity showed very different dependences on the chirality strength and on the droplets' size, suggesting that the rotations of the two droplets may be driven by independent torques with different origins. This is the first observation that the cholesteric droplets under the temperature gradient exhibit the two rotational modes, the pure director rotation and the molecular barycentric motion, which can be switched to each other by changing the heat-current direction parallel and perpendicular to the helical axis.