Related papers: Light-controlled skyrmions and torons as reconfigu…

Malleability of metals is an example of how dynamics of defects like dislocations induced by external stresses alters material properties and enables technological applications. However, these defects move merely to comply with the…

Magnetic skyrmions are topological magnetic spin structures exhibiting particle-like behaviour. They are of strong interest from a fundamental viewpoint and for application, where they have potential to act as information carriers in future…

Skyrmions are topologically protected quasiparticles, originally studied in condensed-matter systems and recently in photonics, with great potential in ultra-high-capacity information storage. Despite the recent attention, most optical…

Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…

Topological magnetic solitons, such as skyrmions, exhibit intriguing particle-like properties that make them attractive for fundamental research and practical applications. While many magnetic systems can host skyrmions as statically stable…

The manipulation and sorting of chiral nanoparticles are of fundamental importance in multidisciplinary fields ranging from biochemistry to nanophotonics. In this study, we propose a novel and controllable chirality sorting mechanism for…

Coexistence of order and fluidity in soft matter often mimics that in biology, allowing for complex dynamics and applications like displays. In active soft matter, emergent order can arise because of such dynamics. Powered by local energy…

Being ubiquitous, solitons have particle-like properties, exhibiting behaviour often associated with atoms. Bound solitons emulate dynamics of molecules, though solitonic analogues of polymeric materials have not been considered yet. Here…

Skyrmions are topological solitons that emerge in many physical contexts. In magnetism, they appear as textures of the spin-density field stabilized by different competing interactions and characterized by a topological charge that counts…

The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…

Skyrmions, as quasiparticles with topological spin textures, has recently garnered great attention for both condensed matter and structured wave communities, promising next-generation large-density robust information technologies. However,…

Topology establishes a unifying framework for a diverse range of scientific areas including particle physics, cosmology, and condensed matter physics. One of the most fascinating manifestations of topology in the context of condensed matter…

The interplay of nonlinearity and topology results in many novel and emergent properties across a number of physical systems such as chiral magnets, nematic liquid crystals, Bose-Einstein condensates, photonics, high energy physics, etc. It…

Optical skyrmions are members of the emerging topological branch of solid-state physics and photonics, allowing for control over topological light textures through light-matter interactions. However, in nanophotonics their practical…

Torons are three-dimensional double-twist solitons in chiral nematic liquid crystals that form localised director configurations protected by topology and bounded by closed defect loops. They behave as particle-like entities while retaining…

Optical topologies in the form of Skyrmions have attracted significant interest of late, where their integer Skyrmion number has been shown to be robust to complex media. Here we create the first fractional Skyrmions by structuring light as…

Topological solitons are knots in continuous physical fields classified by non-zero Hopf index values. Despite arising in theories that span many branches of physics, from elementary particles to condensed matter and cosmology, they remain…

Liquid crystals (LCs) form an extremely rich range of self-assembled topological structures with artificially or naturally created topological defects. Some of the main applications of LCs are various optical and photonic devices, where…

Magnetic skyrmions are small swirling topological defects in the magnetization texture stabilized by the protection due to their topology. In most cases they are induced by chiral interactions between atomic spins existing in…

We explore spatially localized solitonic configurations of a director field, generated using optical realignment and laser-induced heating, in frustrated chiral nematic liquid crystals confined between substrates with perpendicular surface…