Related papers: Optically enriched and guided dynamics of active s…

The incorporation of structured light techniques into vision science has enabled more selective probes of polarization related entoptic phenomena. Diverse sets of stimuli have become accessible in which the spatially dependant optical…

Light-matter interactions are often considered governed by the electric optical field only, leaving aside the magnetic component of light. However, the magnetic part plays a determining role in many optical processes from light and…

Dynamics of small particles, both living such as swimming bacteria and inanimate, such as colloidal spheres, has fascinated scientists for centuries. If one could learn how to control and streamline their chaotic motion, that would open…

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…

Skyrmions are topological structures defined by a winding vector configuration that yields a quantized topological charge. In magnetic materials, skyrmions manifest as stable, mobile spin textures, positioning them at the forefront of…

The dynamic control of novel states of matter beyond thermodynamic equilibrium is a fundamental pursuit in condensed matter physics. Intense terahertz fields have enabled metal-insulator transitions, superconductivity, quantum paraelectric…

Light interacts differently with left and right handed three dimensional chiral objects, like helices, and this leads to the phenomenon known as optical activity. Here, by applying a polarization tomography, we show experimentally, for the…

Transmitting structured light robustly through complex random media is crucial in many applications, from sensing to communication. Unfortunately, the spatial structure of light is distorted in such media due to refractive index…

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…

Thanks to their unique properties, nematic liquid crystals feature a variety of mechanisms for light-matter interactions. For continuous-wave optical excitations, the two dominant contributions stem from reorientational and thermal…

Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…

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…

Research at the frontier between optics and magnetism is revealing a wealth of innovative phenomena and avenues of exploration. Optical waves are demonstrating the capacity to induce ultrafast magnetism, while optical analogs of magnetic…

Skyrmions are topological defects belonging to nontrivial homotopy classes in particle theory. Their remarkably stable topology has recently been observed in electromagnetic waves. For the evanescent fields near a surface, this has been…

Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…

The creation and manipulation of photonic skyrmions provide a novel degree of freedom for light-matter interactions, optical communication and nanometrology. Since the localized vortex within skyrmions arises from the twist and curl of the…

While chiral magnets, metal-based magnetic multilayers, or Heusler compounds have been considered as the material workhorses in the field of skyrmionics, oxides are now emerging as promising alternatives, as they host special correlations…

Quasiparticles in liquid crystals, such as torons and skyrmions, represent a new class of topologically protected solitonic excitations, offering a promising route toward soft microrobotics. Here we demonstrate that torons can be propelled…

Topologically stable field configurations appear in many fields of physics, from elementary particles to condensed matter and cosmology. During the last decade, chiral liquid crystals and chiral magnets took on the role of model objects for…

Topological solitons are crucial to many branches of physics, such as models of fundamental particles in quantum field theory, information carriers in nonlinear optics, and elementary entities in quantum and classical computations. Chiral…