Randall Kamien
University of Pennsylvania
 

The fundamental issues of symmetry related to chirality are
discussed and applied to simple situations relevant
to liquid crystals. The macroscopic pitch of cholesterics is
calculated in terms of a simple classical model. We
find that the pitch depends on both intermolecular biaxial
correlations and a chiral measure of the constituent
molecule. We show that any chiral measure of a geometric object
is a pseudoscalar and must involve three-point correlations.