Reversal of helicoidal twist handedness near point defects of confined chiral liquid crystals

Abstract

Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the ground-state helicoidal configuration often arise due to the effects of confinement and external fields. We directly probe the twist directionality of liquid crystal director structures through experimental three-dimensional imaging and numerical minimization of the elastic free energy and show that spatially localized regions of handedness opposite to that of the chiral liquid crystal ground state can arise in the proximity of twisted-soliton-bound topological point defects. In chiral nematic liquid crystal confined to a film that has a thickness less than the cholesteric pitch and perpendicular surface boundary conditions, twisted solitonic structures embedded in a uniform unwound far-field background with chirality-matched handedness locally relieve confinement-imposed frustration and tend to be accompanied by point defects and smaller geometry-required, energetically costly regions of opposite twist handedness. We also describe a spatially localized structure, dubbed a "twistion," in which a twisted solitonic three-dimensional director configuration is accompanied by four point defects. We discuss how our findings may impinge on the stability of localized particlelike director field configurations in chiral and nonchiral liquid crystals.