Chiral materials

Patent Pending Handedness is necessarily intrinsic to chiral materials. Handedness is manifest in the microstructure of homogeneous/homogenizable chiral materials. For example, an isotropic chiral material comprises a random dispersion of handed molecules or inclusions. In contrast, handedness is manifest at the macroscopic level in structurally chiral materials. For example, the molecules of cholesteric liquid crystals are randomly positioned but macroscopically they exhibit a helicoidal orientational order. Other examples of structurally chiral materials can be fabricated either as stacks of uniaxial laminas or using sculptured thin films. Remarkably, artificial examples of both types of chiral materials were produced by J. C. Bose more than 11 decades ago.