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

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…

Active emulsions and liquid crystalline shells are intriguing and experimentally realisable types of topological matter. Here we numerically study the morphology and spatiotemporal dynamics of a double emulsion, where one or two passive…

Collective rotations are common in active matter, enhancing cohesion, transport, and mixing. They are typically attributed to chiral non-reciprocal dynamics due to intrinsic particle chirality, torque-generating interactions among units, or…

Light beams, with their rich degrees of freedom, including polarization and phase, along with their flexible tunability, have emerged as an ideal tool for generating magnetic topological textures.However, how to precisely control the light…

Skyrmions are particle-like topological excitations, studied in various condensed matter systems and models of high-energy physics (HEP). They occur as stable spin textures in certain planar magnetic materials and as configurations in…

Microscopic active droplets are of interest since they can be used to transport matter from one point to another. The challenge is to control the trajectory. In this work, we demonstrate an approach to control the direction of active…

Magnetic skyrmions are topologically-protected spin textures with attractive properties suitable for high-density and low-power spintronic device applications. Much effort has been dedicated to understanding the dynamical behaviours of the…

Liquid crystal skyrmions are topologically protected spatially localized distortions of the director field which are fascinating from both fundamental mathematics and applied physics points of view. Skyrmions are realized in experimental…

Topological properties of energy flow of light are fundamentally interesting and have rich practical applications in optical manipulations. Here, skyrmion-like structures formed by Poynting vectors are unveiled in the focal region of a pair…

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 reorientational nonlinearity of nematic liquid crystals enables a self-localized spatial soliton and its waveguide to be deflected or destroyed by a control beam propagating across the cell. We demonstrate a simple all-optical…

Design of soft matter capable of controllable microscale dynamics is a frontier of modern science. Jiahao Chen et al. demonstrate that an electric field can drive particle-like solitons-skyrmions in a chiral nematic along a preprogrammed…

It is spatial dispersion which is exclusively responsible for the emergence of exchange interaction and magnetic ordering. In contrast, magneto-crystalline anisotropy present in any realistic material brings in a certain non-linearity to…

The topologically protected magnetic spin configurations known as skyrmions offer promising applications due to their stability, mobility and localization. In this work, we emphasize how to leverage the thermally driven dynamics of an…

Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…

We address the interactions between optical solitons in the system with longitudinally varying nonlocality degree and nonlinearity strength. We consider a physical model describing light propagation in nematic liquid crystals featuring a…

We numerically study the dynamics of two-dimensional blue phases in active chiral liquid crystals. We show that introducing contractile activity results in stabilised blue phases, while small extensile activity generates ordered but dynamic…

Analogies between non-trivial topologies of matter and light have inspired numerous studies, including defect formation in structured light and topological photonic band-structures. Three-dimensional topological objects of localized…

Photomechanical liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are responsive polymers that can convert light directly into mechanical deformation. This unique feature makes these materials an attractive candidate for soft actuators capable of remote and…

Structured light offers a promising solution for the increasing data demands of modern optical networks, opening up new degrees of freedom that can be leveraged for greater channel capacity and more bits per photon. However, its…