Related papers: Disclination Loops, Hedgehogs, and All That
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are lyotropic materials which are attracting growing interest for their adaptability to living systems. A considerable body of works has been devoted to exploring their properties and applications. In this…
We show that topological defects in an ion-doped nematic liquid crystal can be used to manipulate the surface charge distribution on chemically homogeneous, charge-regulating external surfaces, using a minimal theoretical model. In…
Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
We provide a quantitative analysis of all kinds of topological defects present in 2D passive and active repulsive disk systems. We show that the passage from the solid to the hexatic is driven by the unbinding of dislocations. Instead,…
Topological semimetals have emerged as an important class of quantum materials with novel electronic responses and unconventional transport phenomena. Among them, nodal-line semimetals are distinguished by band crossings that extend along…
The discovery of topological insulators has reformed modern materials science, promising to be a platform for tabletop relativistic physics, electronic transport without scattering, and stable quantum computation. Topological invariants are…
Searching for topological insulators/superconductors is a central subject in recent condensed matter physics. As a theoretical aspect, various classification methods of symmetry-protected topological phases have been developed, where the…
Topological order in strongly correlated systems, including quantum spin liquids, quantum Hall states in lattices and topological superconductivity is treated. Various metallic non-Fermi-liquid states are discussed, including fractionalized…
We show that back-flow, the coupling between the order parameter and the velocity fields, has a significant effect on the motion of defects in nematic liquid crystals. In particular the defect speed can depend strongly on the topological…
This paper summarizes a talk presented at the April NATO ASI on Spatiotemporal Chaos in Complex Fluids, in Santa Fe, NM. The paper gives reasons that make complex fluids good material systems for conducting experiments on pattern formation…
Topological defects play a prominent role in the physics of two-dimensional materials. When driven out of equilibrium in active nematics, disclinations can acquire spontaneous self-propulsion and drive self-sustained flows upon…
Topological defects play a fundamental role in the investigation of symmetries in quantum field theories. For conformal field theories in two space-time dimensions, it is possible to construct these defects using lattice models allowing…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
Colloidal rods immersed in a thermotropic liquid-crystalline solvent are at the basis of so-called hybrid liquid crystals which are characterized by tunable nematic fluidity with symmetries ranging from conventional uniaxial nematic or…
The structure of a molecular liquid, in both the nematic liquid crystalline and isotropic phases, around a cylindrical macroparticle, is studied using density functional theory. In the nematic phase the structure of the fluid is highly…
Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…
For many materials, a precise knowledge of their dispersion spectra is insufficient to predict their ordered phases and physical responses. Instead, these materials are classified by the geometrical and topological properties of their…
We show that the number of distinct topological states associated to a given knotted defect, $L$, in a nematic liquid crystal is equal to the determinant of the link $L$. We give an interpretation of these states, demonstrate how they may…
Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…
Controlling the topology of structures self-assembled from a set of heterogeneous building blocks is highly desirable for many applications, but is poorly understood theoretically. Here we show that the thermodynamic theory of self-assembly…