Related papers: Knotted Defects in Nematic Liquid Crystals
Cholesteric liquid crystals experience geometric frustration when they are confined between surfaces with anchoring conditions that are incompatible with the cholesteric twist. Because of this frustration, they develop complex topological…
A {\it stuck knot} is a knot diagram containing designated crossings, called {\it stuck crossings}, whose incident strands are required to remain locally non-separable. These rigidity constraints restrict the allowable ambient isotopies and…
Nematicity is a well known property of liquid crystals and has been recently discussed in the context of strongly interacting electrons. An electronic nematic phase has been seen by many experiments in certain strongly correlated materials,…
In experiments which take a liquid crystal rapidly from the isotropic to the nematic phase, a dense tangle of defects is formed. In nematics, there are in principle both line and point defects (``hedgehogs''), but no point defects are…
We examine the equilibrium configurations of a nematic liquid crystal with an immersed body in two-dimensions. A complex variables formulation provides a means for finding analytical solutions in the case of strong anchoring. Local…
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…
We study a class of symmetric critical points in a variational $2D$ Landau - de Gennes model where the state of nematic liquid crystals is described by symmetric traceless $3\times 3$ matrices. These critical points play the role of…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…
This study investigates the existence and stability of localized states in the discrete nonlinear Schr\"odinger (DNLS) equation with quadratic and cubic nonlinearities, describing the so-called quantum droplets and bubbles. Those states…
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…
It is shown that curved and flat helical double twisted liquid crystal (DTLC) in blue phase, can be unstable (stable) depending of the sign, negative (positive) of sectional curvature, depending on the pitch of the helix of the nematic…
Using a combination of the replica-exchange Monte Carlo algorithm and the multicanonical method, we investigate the influence of bending stiffness on the conformational phases of a bead-stick homopolymer model and present the pseudo-phase…
Nematic liquid crystal (LC) is a partially ordered matter that has been a popular model system for studying a variety of topological behaviors in condensed matter. In this work, utilizing a spontaneously twisting achiral LC, we introduce a…
We theoretically show how two impurity defects in a crystalline structure can be entangled through coupling with the crystal. We demonstrate this with a harmonic chain of trapped ions in which two ions of a different species are embedded.…
Liquid crystals inevitably possess topological defect excitations generated through boundary conditions, applied fields or in quenches to the ordered phase. In equilibrium pairs of defects coarsen and annihilate as the uniform ground state…
I describe new phases of a chiral liquid crystal with nematic and hexatic order. I find a conical phase, similar to that of a cholesteric in an applied magnetic field for Frank elastic constants $K_2>K_3$. I discuss the role of fluctuations…
We study the topology of smectic defects in two and three dimensions. We give a topological classification of smectic point defects and disclination lines in three dimensions. In addition we describe the combination rules for smectic point…
Based on the data of 12-17-crossing knots, we establish three new conjectures about the hyperbolic volume and knot cohomology: (1) There exists a constant $a \in R_{>0}$ such that the percentage of knots for which the following inequality…
We study nematic liquid crystal configurations in a prototype bistable device - the Post Aligned Bistable Nematic (PABN) cell. Working within the Oseen-Frank continuum model, we describe the liquid crystal configuration by a unit-vector…
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,…