Related papers: Topological vacancies in spherical crystal cluster…
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…
Topological defects (TDs) are crucial for understanding important physical properties of crystalline materials including mechanical failure, ion transport, and two-dimensional melting. This concept has not translated to disordered materials…
Dislocations, as topological defects in crystal lattices, are fundamental to understanding plasticity in materials. Similar periodic structures also arise in continuum field theories, such as chiral soliton lattices (CSLs), which appear in…
The uniform director field obtained for the nematic ground state of the hard-rod model of liquid crystals in two dimensions reflects the high symmetry of the constituents of the liquid; It is a manifestation of the constituents' local…
We study how topological crystalline defects--dislocations--reshape the real-space quantum geometric tensor and act as tunable sources of quantum geometry. We show that dislocations strongly enhance the quantum metric, establishing a direct…
The discovery of topological insulators has reformed modern materials science, promising to be a platform for tabletop relativistic physics, electronic transport without scattering, and stable quantum computation. Topological invariants are…
Topological photonics sheds light on some of the surprising phenomena seen in condensed matter physics that arise with the appearance of topological invariants. Optical waveguides provide a well-controlled platform to investigate effects…
Using a version of density-functional theory which combines Onsager approximation and fundamental-measure theory for spatially nonuniform phases, we have studied the phase diagram of freely rotating hard rectangles and hard discorectangles.…
Geometry and topology play a fundamental role in determining pattern formation on 2D surfaces in condensed matter physics. For example, local positive Gaussian curvature of a 2D surface attracts positive topological defects in a liquid…
We exploit the long-ranged elastic fields inherent to confined nematic liquid crystals to assemble colloidal particles trapped at the liquid crystal interface into reconfigurable structures with complex symmetries and packings. Spherical…
Many physical systems involve two types of orientational order, which are coupled together. For example, ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals have coupled polar and nematic order, and tilted hexatic phases have coupled polar and hexatic…
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…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles are versatile building blocks that self-assemble into a rich diversity of mesostructures. Coarse-grained molecular simulations have commonly accompanied experiments by resolving structure formation pathways and…
A hallmark feature of topologically ordered states of matter is the dependence of ground state degeneracy (GSD) on the topology of the manifold determined by the global shape of the system. Although the topology of a physical system is…
Two-dimensional confinement of lattices produces a variety of order and disorder phenomena. When the confining walls have atomic granularity, unique structural phases are expected, of relevance in nanotribology, porous materials or…
The Materials Project crystal structure database has been searched for materials possessing layered motifs in their crystal structures using a topology-scaling algorithm. The algorithm identifies and measures the sizes of bonded atomic…
Topological phases with insulating bulk and gapless surface or edge modes have attracted much attention because of their fundamental physics implications and potential applications in dissipationless electronics and spintronics. In this…
Grain boundaries in extremely confined colloidal smectics possess a topological fine structure with coexisting nematic and tetratic symmetry of the director field. An alternative way to approach the problem of smectic topology is via the…
Topological defects are crucial to the thermodynamics and structure of condensed matter systems. For instance, when incorporated into crystalline membranes like graphene, disclinations with positive and negative topological charge…
We study in experiment and with computer simulation the free energy and the kinetics of vacancy and interstitial defects in two-dimensional dipolar crystals. The defects appear in different local topologies which we characterize by their…