  We investigate the emergence of chiral meso-structures in one-dimensional
fluids consisting of stacked discotic particles and demonstrate that helical
undulations are generated spontaneously from internal elastic stresses. The
stability of these helical conformations arises from an interplay between
long-ranged soft repulsions and nanopore confinement which is naturally present
in columnar liquid crystals. Using a simple mean-field theory based on
microscopic considerations we identify generic scaling expressions for the
typical buckling radius and helical pitch as a function of the density and
interaction potential of the constituent particles.
