Polycontinuous morphologies and interwoven helical networks

Abstract

We describe a construction procedure for polycontinuous structures, giving generalisations of bicontinuous morphologies to more than two equivalent, continuous and interwoven sub-volumes. The construction gives helical windings of disjoint graphs on triply periodic hyperbolic surfaces, whose universal cover in the hyperbolic plane consists of packed, parallel trees. The simplest tri-, quadra-and octa-continuous morphologies consist of three (8, 3) - c, four (10, 3) - a and eight (10, 3) - a interwoven networks, respectively. The quadra-and octa-continuous cases are chiral. A novel chiral bicontinuous structure is also derived, closely related to the well-known cubic gyroid mesophase.