Search

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 fabricated aggregates of cholesteric cylinders coexisting with the isotropic phase and investigated their dynamics under a temperature gradient. Each constituent cylinder possessed the double-tw...

We show that cholesteric (Ch) liquid crystal droplets with cylindrically symmetric orientation dispersing in an isotropic (Iso) phase exhibited unidirectional rotation under a heat flux along the symmetry axis. By introducing colloidal particle adhesive to the Ch droplet surface, we traced the translational motion of the colloids and found that the colloids rotated unidirectionally around the center of each Ch droplet. The director configuration of the droplets was not distorted either spatially or temporally, while the colloids rotated constantly. The results suggest that the Ch droplets under the heat flux should rotate as a rigid body. Using this heat-driven rotation of the Ch droplets, we designed new geometries of various composites of Ch droplets and colloids and succeeded in driving intriguing complex dynamics.

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 made aggregates of cholesteric liquid crystalline Cylinders with Double-Twist orientational structure (DTC) and investigated their rigid-body rotation under a temperature gradient, focusing on how the rotational speed should depend on the cylinder size. The experimental results showed that the angular velocity of the DTC aggregates linearly increased with the height of the cylinders and was inversely proportional to the base area. With a phenomenological equation, we analyzed the torque caused by the heat flux and its balance with the viscous friction, and found that the simple analysis well explained the size-dependence of the rotation of the DTC aggregates. The coupling constant between the heat flux and the torque to drive the rigid-body rotation was in the same order of magnitude as that for the director rotation.

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.

When a cholesteric liquid crystal (LC) is submitted to a thermal gradient, it exhibits continuous director rotation. The phenomenon is called the Lehmann effect and is understood as a thermomechanical coupling in chiral LCs without mirror symmetry. Since the Lehmann effect is considered to possess time-reversal symmetry, one can expect the inverse process, i.e., rotating chiral LCs to pump heat along the rotational axis. We report the first observation of heat transport driven by rotating cholesteric droplets. This result suggests a new function of the cholesterics as a micro heat pump.