Pawel Pieranski - Liquid Crystals

The fifth chapter, Spontaneous Emergence of Chirality , deals with nematics, which are made up of achiral molecules. It begins with a very detailed historical tour leading to the birth of the concept of chirality . The tour starts with the discovery of double refraction in Iceland spar crystals by Erasmus Bartolinus in 1669, followed by the crucial contributions of Huygens, Malus, Arago, Brewster, Biot, Fresnel and Faraday, leading to the epoch marking the discovery of molecular chirality by Louis Pasteur. The work of Pasteur gave birth to a common belief that the optical activity of materials results from the existence of molecular chirality. The observations of chiral textures in lyotropic nematics discussed in this fifth chapter break this common belief and unlock new perspectives.

We would like to thank Mme Françoise Brochard-Wyart for the invitation to write this book. Its contours were fixed thanks to Tigran Galstian, who invited six of the authors to the 18th Conference on Optics of Liquid Crystals, in Quebec.

The printing in color of this book was sponsored by : 1) Marie Curie Grant N¡838199, 2) Department of Physics and Materials Science at The University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee (USA), 3) National Science Foundation (USA) grant DMR-1905053 entitled “Active colloids with tunable interactions in liquid crystals”, 4) Laboratoire de Physique at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon (France), 5) Laboratoire de Physique des Solides at Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay (France), 6) i3N/CENIMAT, NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon (Portugal), 7) School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia (USA).

The writing of this book lasted for about one year. Once the work was finished, we were tempted to say, following the Eulogy of Leonhard Euler by Marquis de Condorcet, that:

... the pleasure to work is a sweeter reward than glory ...

On behalf of all the authors

March 2021

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