Related papers: Global Defect Topology in Nematic Liquid Crystals
Composed of microscopic layers that stack along one direction while maintaining fluid-like positional disorder within layers, smectics are excellent systems for exploring topology, defects and geometric memory in complex confining…
This paper is dedicated to studying various aspects of topological defects, appearing in mean-field theory treatments of physical systems such as ultracold atomic gases and gauge field theories. We start by investigating topological charge…
Magnetic vortices and skyrmions are typically characterized by distinct topological invariants. This work presents a unified approach for the topological classification of these textures, encompassing isolated objects and configurations…
Topological defects in nematically aligned cell populations play a critical role in modulating collective motion, from microbial colonies to epithelial tissues. Despite the potential of manipulating such topological defects to control…
Crystal defects can highlight interesting quantum features by coupling to the low-energy Hamiltonian $H$. Here we show that independently of this $H$ coupling, topological crystalline defects can generate new features by directly modifying…
We demonstrate scaffolding of plasmonic nanoparticles by topological defects induced by colloidal microspheres to match their surface boundary conditions with a uniform far-field alignment in a liquid crystal host. Displacing energetically…
We develop a unified framework to classify topological defects in insulators and superconductors described by spatially modulated Bloch and Bogoliubov de Gennes Hamiltonians. We consider Hamiltonians H(k,r) that vary slowly with adiabatic…
In this paper we further explore the question of topological charge in the center vortex-nexus picture of gauge theories. Generally, this charge is locally fractionalized in units of 1/N for gauge group SU(N), but globally quantized in…
Nematic colloids exhibit a large diversity of topological defects and structures induced by colloidal particles in the orientationally ordered liquid crystal host fluids. These defects and field configurations define elastic interactions…
When colloidal particles are vertically confined to a gap of between 1.3-1.6 particle diameters, they pack into buckled crystals of particles in either "up" or "down" states. Neighboring particles tend to occupy opposite states, analogous…
We study the relationship between topological defect formation and ground-state packings in a model of repulsions in external confining potentials. Specifically we consider screened 2D Coulombic repulsions, which conveniently parameterizes…
Textures are topologically nontrivial field configurations which can exist in a field theory in which a global symmetry group $G$ is broken to a subgroup $H$, if the third homotopy group $\p3$ of $G/H$ is nontrivial. We compute this group…
Physical systems are frequently modeled as sets of points in space, each representing the position of an atom, molecule, or mesoscale particle. As many properties of such systems depend on the underlying ordering of their constituent…
We review the interpretation of Whitehead products in homotopy theory as an entanglement of topological defects in ordered media.
Given a (genus 2) cube-with-holes M, i.e. the complement in S^3 of a handlebody H, we relate intrinsic properties of M (like its cut number) with extrinsic features depending on the way the handlebody H is knotted in S^3. Starting from a…
Ordinary nematic liquid crystals are characterized by having a uniform director field as ground state. In such a state, the director is the same everywhere and no distortion is to be seen at all. We give a definition of uniform distortion…
We study non-interacting electrons in disordered one-dimensional materials which exhibit a spectral gap, in each of the ten Altland-Zirnbauer symmetry classes. We define an appropriate topology on the space of Hamiltonians so that the…
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…
A universal topological marker has been proposed recently to map the topological invariants of Dirac models in any dimension and symmetry class to lattice sites. Using this topological marker, we examine the conditions under which the…
The continuous 1D defects of an isotropic homogeneous material in a flat 3D space are classified by the Volterra process construction method. We employ the same method to classify the continuous 2D defects of a vacuum in a 4D maximally…