{"doi":"10.1063/5.0078937","title":"Self-consistent field theory of chiral nematic worm-like chains","abstract":"Many macromolecules of biological and technological interest are both chiral and semi-flexible. DNA and collagen are good examples. Such molecules often form chiral nematic (or cholesteric) phases, as is well-documented in collagen and chitin. This work presents a method for studying cholesteric phases in the highly successful self-consistent field theory of worm-like chains, offering a new way of studying many biologically relevant molecules. The method involves an effective Hamiltonian with a chiral term inspired by the Oseen-Frank (OF) model of liquid crystals. This method is then used to examine the formation of cholesteric phases in chiral-nematic worm-like chains as a function of polymer flexibility, as well as the optimal cholesteric pitch and distribution of polymer segment orientations. Our approach not only allows for the determination of the isotropic-cholesteric transition and segment distributions, beyond what the OF model promises, but also explicitly incorporates polymer flexibility into the study of the cholesteric phase, offering a more complete understanding of the behavior of semiflexible chiral-nematic polymers.","journal":"The Journal of Chemical Physics","year":2022,"id":294401,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9526,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":979774,"name":"Bae‐Yeun Ha","orcid":"0000-0003-2089-6759","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":812188,"name":"Nima Saeidi","orcid":"0000-0002-7016-9018","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":979773,"name":"Russell K. W. Spencer","orcid":"0000-0002-4814-9010","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":38,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:01.450041Z","pmid":"35317576","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}