Chiral self-assembly of helical particles

The shape of the building blocks plays a crucial role in directing self-assembly towards desired architectures. Out of the many different shapes, the helix has a unique position. Helical structures are ubiquitous in nature and a helical shape is exhibited by the most important biopolymers like polynucleotides, polypeptides and polysaccharides as well as by cellular organelles like flagella. Helical particles can self-assemble into chiral superstructures, which may have a variety of applications,e.g.as photonic (meta)materials. However, a clear and definite understanding of these structures has not been entirely achieved yet. We have recently undertaken an extensive investigation on the phase behaviour of hard helical particles, using numerical simulations and classical density functional theory. Here we present a detailed study of the phase diagram of hard helices as a function of their morphology. This includes a variety of liquid-crystal phases, with different degrees of orientational and positional ordering. We show how, by tuning the helix parameters, it is possible to control the organization of the system. Starting from slender helices, whose phase behaviour is similar to that of rodlike particles, an increase in curliness leads to the onset of azimuthal correlations between the particles and the formation of phases specific to helices. These phases feature a new kind of screw order, of which there is experimental evidence in colloidal suspensions of helical flagella.

Second Harmonic Suppression in S-Band Traveling Wave Tube Tapers

Traveling wave tubes (TWTs) operating at S-band are to be improved by suppressing the second harmonic frequency. Among the different possibilities, two techniques, namely harmonic injection and a filter helix for frequency selective signal suppression, are studied in more detail and applied to S-band tubes in both simulation and measurement. In addition, their suitability to improve tube performance by reducing the second harmonic is discussed. Moreover, filter helix implementation in TWTs with an arbitrary pitch profile along the interaction area is considered. In this context, the dependence of the pitch discontinuity reflection coefficient on several filter helix parameters is investigated. The influence of those parameters on the filter performance is shown by filter helix optimization. Measurement results of the optimized filter helix TWT are presented.