Related papers: Hedgehog topological defects in 3D amorphous solid…
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…
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…
Anelasticity, as an intrinsic property of amorphous solids, plays a significant role in understanding their relaxation and deformation mechanism. However, due to the lack of long-range order in amorphous solids, the structural origin of…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Combination of topology and general relativity can lead to some profound and farsighted predictions. It is well known that symmetry breaking of the Higgs vacuum field in the early universe possibly induced topological defects in spacetime,…
There is a growing evidence that relaxation in glassy materials, both spontaneous and externally driven, is mediated by localized soft spots. Recent progress made it possible to identify the soft spots inside glassy structures and to…
Topological states can be used to control the mechanical properties of a material along an edge or around a localized defect. The surface rigidity of elastic networks is characterized by a bulk topological invariant called the polarization;…
In fracture mechanics, polyacrylamide hydrogels have been widely used as a model material for experiments, benefited from its optical transparency, fracture brittleness, and low Rayleigh wave velocity. To describe the brittle fracture in…
Herein, fundamentals of topology and symmetry breaking are used to understand crystallization and geometrical frustration in topologically close-packed structures. This frames solidification from a new perspective that is unique from…
Plastic instabilities in amorphous materials are often studied using idealized models of binary mixtures that do not capture accurately molecular interactions and bonding present in real glasses. Here we study atomic scale plastic…
Using a well defined soft model glass in the framework of Molecular Dynamics simulations, the inherent structures are probed by means of a recently developed deformation protocol that aims to capture the Dynamical Heterogeneities (DH), as…
Directional media, such as nematic liquid crystals and ferromagnets, are characterized by their topologically stabilized defects in directional order. In nematics, boundary conditions and surface-treated inclusions often create complex…
It was recently shown that vortex-like topological defects with negative winding number in the vibrational modes of a two-dimensional glass under quasistatic shear correlate strongly with plastic events, offering a promising route to…
It has been a long-standing materials science challenge to establish structure-property relations in amorphous solids. Here we introduce a rotation-variant local structure representation that enables different predictions for different…
The formation of shear bands in amorphous solids such as glasses has remained an open question in our understanding of condensed matter and amorphous materials. Unlike in crystals, well-defined topological defects such as dislocations have…
Stable array of point defects was generated in nematic liquid crystal. Point defects with topological charge of +1 and -1 (hedgehogs) were generated in vertically aligned liquid crystal cell. The hedgehogs were arranged in square or…
Structural heterogeneity of amorphous solids present difficult challenges that stymie the prediction of plastic events, which are intimately connected to their mechanical behavior. Based on a perturbation analysis of the potential energy…
The language and methods of algebraic topology, particularly homotopy theory, have been extensively used in the study of the identification, the classification and the evolution of defects. Topological methods provide the means for the…
A 2D foam can be characterised by its distribution of bubble areas, and of number of sides. Both distributions have an average and a width (standard deviation). There are therefore at least two very different ways to characterise the…
Point defects govern many important functional properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials. However, resolving the three-dimensional (3D) arrangement of these defects in multi-layer 2D materials remains a fundamental challenge, hindering…