Phase winding in chiral liquid crystalline monolayers due to Lehmann effects.

We model recent experimental results by Tabe and Yokoyama on chiral liquid crystalline monolayers driven by the transmembrane transfer of water molecules. We point out that the target patterns found for the orientation of the in-plane preferred direction can be described as phase winding due to Lehmann effects, which are specific to macroscopically chiral systems. The model presented has only one variable and is driven and dissipative. Including the effects of noise leads to an accurate representation of the patterns observed experimentally. Future experimental tests of the model are suggested.