Related papers: Topological transformations of a nematic drop
Emulsions comprising isotropic fluid drops within a nematic host are of interest for applications ranging from biodetection to smart windows, which rely on changes of molecular alignment structures around the drops in response to chemical,…
Abundant in nature, colloids also find increasingly important applications in science and technology, ranging from direct probing of kinetics in crystals and glasses to fabrication of third-generation quantum-dot solar cells. Because…
Topological spin and polar textures have fascinated people in different areas of physics and technologies. However, the observations are limited in magnetic and solid-state ferroelectric systems. Ferroelectric nematic is the first…
We study emergent dynamics in a viscous drop subject to interfacial nematic activity. Using hydrodynamic simulations, we show how the interplay of nematodynamics, activity-driven flows and surface deformations gives rise to a sequence of…
Time-variant systems have recently garnered considerable attention due to their unique potentials in manipulating electromagnetic waves. Here, a novel class of topological spacetime crystals is introduced, with a traveling-wave modulation…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
Combining topology and plasmonics paradigms in nanocolloidal systems may enable new means of pre-engineering desired composite material properties. Here we design and realize orientationally ordered assemblies of noble metal nanoparticles…
Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…
Active matter encompasses different nonequilibrium systems in which individual constituents convert energy into non-conservative forces or motion at the microscale. This review provides an elementary introduction to the role of topology in…
We show how the squeezing of light can lead to the formation of topological states. Such states are characterized by non-trivial Chern numbers, and exhibit protected edge modes which give rise to chiral elastic and inelastic photon…
We study two dimensional tactoids in nematic liquid crystals by using a $\mathbf{Q}$-tensor representation. A bulk free energy of the Maier-Saupe form with eigenvalue constraints on $\mathbf{Q}$, plus elastic terms up to cubic order in…
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…
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…
In contrast to conservative systems, in nonlinear media with gain and loss the dynamics of localized topological structures can exhibit unique features that can be controlled externally. We propose a robust mechanism to perform topological…
The intrinsic non-linearities of the spin dynamics in condensed matter systems give rise to a rich phenomenology that can be strongly affected by topology. Here we study formation of magnonic solitons in the topologically nontrivial bandgap…
Crystalline symmetries give rise to topological invariants that can distinguish quantum phases of matter. Understanding these in strongly interacting systems is an ongoing research direction requiring non-perturbative methods. Recent…
Floating drops of magnetic fluid can be brought into rotation by applying a rotating magnetic field. We report theoretical and experimental results on the transition from a spheroid equilibrium shape to non-axissymmetrical three-axes…
Topological defects are singularities in material fields that play a vital role across a range of systems: from cosmic microwave background polarization to superconductors, and biological materials. Although topological defects and their…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
A single semiflexible polymer chain folds into a toroidal object under poor solvent conditions. In this study, we examined the morphological change in such a toroidal state as a function of the width and stiffness of the chain together with…