Related papers: Topological colloids
Topological defects are singularities in material fields that play a vital role across a range of systems: from cosmic microwave background polarization to superconductors, and biological materials. Although topological defects and their…
Colloidal membranes, self assembled monolayers of aligned rod like molecules, offer a template for designing membranes with definite shapes and curvature, and possibly new functionalities in the future. Often the constituent rods, due to…
Colloidal particles in liquid crystals tend to induce topological defects and distortions of the molecular alignment within the surrounding anisotropic host medium, which results in elasticity-mediated interactions not accessible to their…
Starting from Gauss and Kelvin, knots in fields were postulated behaving like particles, but experimentally they were found only as transient features or required complex boundary conditions to exist and couldn't self-assemble into…
The homotopy theory of topological defects is a powerful tool for organizing and unifying many ideas across a broad range of physical systems. Recently, experimental progress has been made in controlling and measuring colloidal inclusions…
Topological defects are one of the most conspicuous features of liquid crystals. In two dimensional nematics, they have been shown to behave effectively as particles with both, charge and orientation, which dictate their interactions. Here,…
In an elegant paper, D. Nelson suggested a method to produce tetravalent colloids based on a tetrahedral configuration created on the surface of a spherical particle. It emerges from a two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal placed on a…
Tying knots and linking microscopic loops of polymers, macromolecules, or defect lines in complex materials is a challenging task for material scientists. We demonstrate the knotting of microscopic topological defect lines in chiral nematic…
Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology…
Topological phenomena typically govern the behavior of delocalized waves, giving rise to robust transport in electronic, photonic, and mechanical systems. Whether similar principles can directly control the motion of a localized particle,…
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,…
Charged surfaces in contact with liquids containing ions are accompanied in equilibrium by an electric double layer consisting of a layer of electric charge on the surface that is screened by a diffuse ion cloud in the bulk fluid. This…
Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
Topological phases usually are unreachable in molecular solids, which are characteristic of weakly dispersed energy bands with a large gap, in contrast to topological materials. In this work, however, we propose that nontrivial electronic…
Widely known for their uses in displays and electro-optics, liquid crystals are more than just technological marvels. They vividly reveal the topology and structure of various solitonic and singular field configurations, often markedly…
Topology is key in describing unconventional quantum phases of matter and devising robust quantum technology. Exactly how topology mixes with quantum mechanics remains largely unclear, as testified by the lack of a unifying microscopic…
Topological acoustic and elastic waves have recently emerged as an exciting interdisciplinary field which is still mainly focused on low-dimensional structures and model systems. Here we demonstrate numerically an elastic-wave analogue of…
Light-activated self-propelled colloids are synthesized and their active motion is studied using optical microscopy. We propose a versatile route using different photoactive materials, and demonstrate a multiwavelength activation and…
Recent studies point out far-reaching connections between the topological characteristics of structural glasses and their material properties, paralleling results in quantum physics that highlight the relevance of the nature of the…