Related papers: Nematics, Knots and Non-orientable Surfaces
After more than 70 years of development, holography has become an essential tool of modern optics in many applications. In fact, for various applications of different kinds of holographic techniques, stability and antijamming ability are…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
We demonstrate a variety of ordered patterns, including hexagonal structures and chains, formed by colloidal particles (droplets) at the free surface of a nematic liquid crystal (LC). The surface placement introduces a new type of particle…
The paper is devoted to relations between topological and metric properties of germs of real surfaces, obtained by analytic maps from $R^2$ to $R^4$. We show that for a big class of such surfaces the normal embedding property implies the…
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…
The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
Links and knots are exotic topological structures that have garnered significant interest across multiple branches of natural sciences. Coherent links and knots, such as those constructed by phase or polarization singularities of coherent…
The central idea of metamaterials and metaoptics is that, besides their base materials, the geometry of structures offers a broad extra dimension to explore for exotic functionalities. Here, we discover that the topology of structures…
With its boundary tracing out a link or knot in 3D, the Seifert surface is a 2D surface of core importance to topological classification. We propose the first-ever experimentally realistic setup where Seifert surfaces emerge as the boundary…
Regulation of topological structures and pattern formation is attracting wide interest in the field of condensed matter. Liquid crystals (LCs) represent soft matter with a remarkable combination of fluidity and anisotropic properties.…
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…
In addition to a plethora of emergent phenomena, the spatial topology of optical vortices enables an array of applications spanning communications to quantum photonics. Nonlinear optics is essential in this context, providing access to an…
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…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
Colloidal systems find important applications ranging from fabrication of photonic crystals to direct probing of phenomena typically encountered in atomic crystals and glasses. New applications - such as nanoantennas, plasmonic sensors, and…
Nematic liquid crystals can dramatically reconfigure under dynamic forcing, providing exciting opportunities in active matter. Here, we study a hybrid disk colloid rotated by an external field which generates a dynamic companion topological…
The recent research of topological photonics has not only proposed and realized novel topological phenomena such as one-way broadband propagation and robust transport of light, but also designed and fabricated photonic devices with…
The topological understanding of nematic liquid crystals is traditionally centered on singularities, or defects, and their classification via homotopy theory. However, this approach has ultimately proved insufficient to properly capture a…