Related papers: Topological colloids
There is now growing evidence of the emergence and biological functionality of liquid crystal features, including nematic order and topological defects, in cellular tissues. However, how such features that intrinsically rely on particle…
Solenoids induced by split sequences are introduced, as the inverse limit object of a sequence of fold maps. The topology of a solenoid is explored, and it is established that solenoids have naturally arising singular foliated structures.…
Knots are familiar entities that appear at a captivating nexus of art, technology, mathematics, and science. As topologically stable objects within field theories, they have been speculatively proposed as explanations for diverse persistent…
Changes in the geometry and topology of self-assembled membranes underlie diverse processes across cellular biology and engineering. Similar to lipid bilayers, monolayer colloidal membranes have in-plane fluid-like dynamics and out-of-plane…
Recent work suggests that topological features of certain quantum gravity theories can be interpreted as particles, matching the known fermions and bosons of the first generation in the Standard Model. This is achieved by identifying…
The interplay between order and geometry in soft condensed matter systems is an active field with many striking results and even more open problems. Ordered structures on curved surfaces appear in multi-electron helium bubbles, viral and…
In the early 2000s, low dimensional systems were predicted to have topologically nontrivial polar structures, such as vortices or skyrmions, depending on mechanical or electrical boundary conditions. A few variants of these structures have…
We study the self-assembly of colloidal microgel particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrate that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization…
Topological insulators in three dimensions are nonmagnetic insulators that possess metallic surface states as a consequence of the nontrivial topology of electronic wavefunctions in the bulk of the material. They are the first known…
The complex physics of self-assembly in colloidal crystals on deformable interfaces and surfaces poses interesting possibilities for the designability and synthesis of next-generation metamaterials. The goal of this article is to…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
In many areas of applied geometric/numeric computational mathematics, including geo-mapping, computer vision, computer graphics, finite element analysis, medical imaging, geometric design, and solid modeling, one has to compute incidences,…
Many cell types spontaneously order like nematic liquid crystals, and, as such, they form topological defects. While defects with topological charge $\pm$1/2 are common in cell monolayers, the defects with charge $\pm$1, relevant in the…
We study by simulation the physics of two colloidal particles in a cholesteric liquid crystal with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The effective force between the pair is attractive at short range and favors…
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…
The integration of topology into photonics has generated a new design framework for constructing robust and unidirectional waveguides, which are not feasible with traditional photonic devices. Here, we overcome current barriers to the…
Despite the omnipresence of colloidal suspensions, little is known about the influence of shape on phase transformations, especially in nonequilibrium. To date, real-space imaging results are limited to systems composed of spherical…
We simulate a colloidal particle (radius R) in a cholesteric liquid crystal (pitch p) with tangential order parameter alignment at the particle surface. The local defect structure evolves from a dipolar pair of surface defects (boojums) at…
This is an unrefereed lecture note based on lectures in 'Introductory Workshop on Discrete Differential Geometry' at Korea University on January 21--24, 2019. In this note, we discuss topological crystallography, which is a mathematical…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…