INTEGRATE at 2025 BLCS Annual Meeting

Dr. William Fall, researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), participated in the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the British Liquid Crystal Society (BLCS), held in Birmingham, UK. During the conference, he presented recent findings from the INTEGRATE project.

The presentation focused on a newly identified mode of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in polydisperse, achiral, near-rigid nematogens, a development that contributes significantly to the understanding of chirality emergence in soft condensed matter.

The study highlights how chirality can arise purely from entropy-driven mechanisms, even in the absence of molecular chirality. Molecular simulations revealed that chiral symmetry breaking results from the interplay of length polydispersity and shape-persistent conformational fluctuations, leading to homochiral twisted nematic phases. This insight opens new avenues for designing chiral structures in synthetic and biological systems without relying on inherently chiral components.

To explore the full findings, visit our Scientific Publications section here and discover more about the publication "Spontaneous Chiral Symmetry Breaking in Polydisperse Achiral Near-Rigid Nematogens".

The spontaneous emergence of chirality in this unique class of liquid crystalline materials