Related papers: Quaternions and hybrid nematic disclinations
Molecular simulations of a nematic liquid crystal confined in cylinder geometry with homeotropic anchoring have been carried out. The core structure of a disclination line defect of strength +1 has been examined, and comparison made with…
Using computer simulations we investigate the microscopic structure of the singular director field within a nematic droplet. As a theoretical model for nematic liquid crystals we take hard spherocylinders. To induce an overall topological…
Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as…
This paper investigates nematic liquid crystals in three-dimensional curved space, and determines which director deformation modes are compatible with each possible type of non-Euclidean geometry. Previous work by Sethna et al. showed that…
We explore spatially localized solitonic configurations of a director field, generated using optical realignment and laser-induced heating, in frustrated chiral nematic liquid crystals confined between substrates with perpendicular surface…
Directional media, such as nematic liquid crystals and ferromagnets, are characterized by their topologically stabilized defects in directional order. In nematics, boundary conditions and surface-treated inclusions often create complex…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles due to elastic interactions in nematic liquid crystals promises tunable composite materials and can be guided by exploiting surface functionalization, geometric shape and topology, though these means of…
Grain boundaries in extremely confined colloidal smectics possess a topological fine structure with coexisting nematic and tetratic symmetry of the director field. An alternative way to approach the problem of smectic topology is via the…
The homotopy theory of topological defects is a powerful tool for organizing and unifying many ideas across a broad range of physical systems. Recently, experimental progress has been made in controlling and measuring colloidal inclusions…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
Free interfaces of liquid crystals tend to minimise both capillarity and anchoring forces. Here we study nematic films in planar and radial geometries with antagonistic anchoring boundary conditions and one deformable interface. Assuming a…
We study dynamical processes in a multi-domain (MD) structured nematic liquid crystal cell with a particular emphasis on the motion, creation and annihilation of disclinations. In the MD cell right- and left-handed director helices…
Within the framework of continuum theory, we draw a parallel between ferromagnetic materials and nematic liquid crystals confined on curved surfaces, which are both characterized by local interaction and anchoring potentials. We show that…
Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…
This article analyzes modulated phases in liquid crystals, from the long-established cholesteric and blue phases to the recently discovered twist-bend, splay-bend, and splay nematic phases, as well as the twist-grain-boundary (TGB) and…
We use molecular dynamics to study the ordering of a nematic liquid crystal around a spherical particle or droplet. Homeotropic boundary conditions and strong anchoring create a hedgehog director configuration on the particle surface and in…
We present a generalized approach to compute the shape and internal structure of two-dimensional nematic domains. By using conformal mappings, we are able to compute the director field for a given domain shape that we choose from a rich…
An exact kinematic law for the motion of disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals as a function of the tensor order parameter $\mathbf{Q}$ is derived. Unlike other order parameter fields that become singular at their respective defect…
We give a description of the intrinsic geometry of elastic distortions in three-dimensional nematic liquid crystals and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of functions to represent these distortions by describing how…
We give the global homotopy classification of nematic textures for a general domain with weak anchoring boundary conditions and arbitrary defect set in terms of twisted cohomology, and give an explicit computation for the case of knotted…