Related papers: Threading the Needle: Generating Textures in Nemat…
Magnetic topological defects are energetically stable spin configurations characterized by symmetry breaking. Vortices and skyrmions are two well-known examples of 2D spin textures that have been actively studied for both fundamental…
We consider two-dimensional (2d) quantum many-body systems with long-range orders, where the only gapless excitations in the spectrum are Goldstone modes of spontaneously broken continuous symmetries. To understand the interplay between…
Heinz Hopf's famous fibrations of the 2n+1-sphere by great circles, the 4n+3-sphere by great 3-spheres, and the 15-sphere by great 7-spheres have a number of interesting properties. Besides providing the first examples of homotopically…
One of the most important properties of topological insulators (TIs) is the helical spin texture of the Dirac surface states, which has been theoretically and experimentally argued to be left-handed helical above the Dirac point and right…
We consider the slow and athermal deformations of amorphous solids and show how the ensuing sequence of discrete plastic rearrangements can be mapped onto a directed network. The network topology reveals a set of highly connected regions…
In this paper we present new results about the topology of the Milnor fibrations of analytic function-germs with a special attention to the topology of the fibers. In particular, we provide a short review on the existence of the Milnor…
Simulations of knotting and unknotting in polymers or other filaments rely on random processes to facilitate topological changes. Here we introduce a method of \textit{topological steering} to determine the optimal pathway by which a…
Topological techniques are used to study the motions of systems of point vortices in the infinite plane, in singly-periodic arrays, and in doubly-periodic lattices. The reduction of each system using its symmetries is described in detail.…
The topology and the geometry of a surface play a fundamental role in determining the equilibrium configurations of thin films of liquid crystals. We propose here a theoretical analysis of a recently introduced surface Frank energy, in the…
Special fibrations of toric varieties have been used by physicists, e.g. the school of Candelas, to construct dual pairs in the study of Het/F-theory duality. Motivated by this, we investigate in this paper the details of toric morphisms…
We give a topological classification of defect lines in cholesteric liquid crystals using methods from contact topology. By focusing on the role played by the chirality of the material, we demonstrate a fundamental distinction between…
We exploit the long-ranged elastic fields inherent to confined nematic liquid crystals to assemble colloidal particles trapped at the liquid crystal interface into reconfigurable structures with complex symmetries and packings. Spherical…
We develop a theory of generalized Hopf invariants in the setting of sectional category. In particular we show how Hopf invariants for a product of fibrations can be identified as shuffle joins of Hopf invariants for the factors. Our…
We investigate the turbulent dynamics of a two-dimensional active nematic liquid crystal con- strained on a curved surface. Using a combination of hydrodynamic and particle-based simulations, we demonstrate that the fundamental structural…
Hopf terms are topological theta terms that are associated with a host of interesting physics, including anyons, statistical transmutation, chiral edge states, and the spin quantum Hall effect. Here, we show that Hopf terms can appear in…
Systems with holes, such as colloidal handlebodies and toroidal droplets, have been studied in the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) 4-cyano-4'-pentylbiphenyl (5CB): both point and ring topological defects can occur within each hole and around…
The goal of this note is to study integrable properties of a generating function of the HOMFLY-PT invariants of the Hopf link colored with different representations. We demonstrate that such a generating function is a $\tau$-function of the…
Toroidal nematics are droplets of nematic liquid crystals in the form of a circular torus. When the nematic director is subject to planar degenerate boundary conditions, the bend-only director field with vector lines along the parallels of…
We study the vertex model for epithelial tissue mechanics extended to include coupling between the cell shapes and tensions in cell-cell junctions. This coupling represents an active force which drives the system out of equilibrium and…
Topological surgery occurs in natural phenomena where two points are selected and attracting or repelling forces are applied. The two points are connected via an invisible `thread'. In order to model topologically such phenomena we…