Related papers: Threading the Needle: Generating Textures in Nemat…

The crystallographic texture is a key organization feature of many technical and biological materials. In these materials, especially hierarchically structured ones, the preferential alignment of the nano constituents is heavily influencing…

We consider textures of biaxial nematics confined between two parallel plates. The boundary conformations at the bordering plates are supposed to be identical, the gradients of the order parameter being generally nonzero. We claim that for…

Toroidal vortex is a kind of novel and exotic structured light with potential applications in photonic topology and quantum information. Here, we present the study on high harmonic generation (HHG) from the interaction of the intense…

This paper presents a novel framework for studying knotted and braided configurations of optical fields, moving beyond the conventional Hopfion solution based on the Hopf fibration. By employing the Seifert fibration, a preferred framing is…

Toroidal nematics are nematic liquid crystals confined within a circular torus and subject to planar degenerate anchoring on the boundary of the torus. They may be droplets floating in an isotropic environment or cavities carved out of a…

Motivated by recent experiments on the rod-like virus bacteriophage fd, confined to circular and annular domains, we present a theoretical study of structural transitions in these geometries. Using the continuum theory of nematic liquid…

Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…

Topological structure is widely invoked as a route to disorder-resilient photonic states, yet whether it protects locally resolved field structure under realistic disorder has not been established. Optical skyrmions, vectorial light fields…

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 study the topology of toric maps. We show that if $f\colon X\to Y$ is a proper toric morphism, with $X$ simplicial, then the cohomology of every fiber of $f$ is pure and of Hodge-Tate type. When the map is a fibration, we give an…

Liquid crystals generally support orientational singularities of the director field known as topological defects. These latter modifiy transport properties in their vicinity as if the geometry was non-Euclidean. We present a state of the…

We study the organization of topological defects in a system of nematogens confined to the two-dimensional sphere (S^2). We first perform Monte Carlo simulations of a fluid system of hard rods (spherocylinders) living in the tangent plane…

We explore a novel strategy of patterning nematic elastomers that does not require inscribing the texture directly. It is based on varying the dopant concentration that, beside shifting the phase transition point, affects the nematic…

We stabilize nematic droplets with handles against surface-tension-driven instabilities using a yield-stress material as outer fluid and study the complex nematic textures and defect structures that result from the competition between…

Quantum simulation with controllable many-body platforms offers a powerful route to exploring complex phases and dynamics that are difficult to access in natural materials. Among these, topological spin textures such as skyrmions are…

Materials with tunable topological features, simple crystal structure and flexible synthesis, are in extraordinary demand towards technological exploitation of unique properties of topological nodal points. The controlled design of the…

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…

We demonstrate that a first order isotropic-to-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals can be succesfully modeled within the generalized Landau-de Gennes theory by selecting an appropriate combination of elastic constants. The numerical…

Topological spin textures exhibit a hierarchical nature. For instance, magnetic skyrmions, which possess a particle-like nature, can aggregate to form superstructures such as skyrmion strings and skyrmion lattices. Magnetic hopfions are…

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…