Related papers: Field-Programmable Topological Torons in Chiral Ne…
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…
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…
Toroidal nematics are nematic liquid crystals confined within a circular torus and subject to planar degenerate anchoring on the boundary of the torus. They may be droplets floating in an isotropic environment or cavities carved out of a…
Solitons in liquid crystals are spatially localised stable configuration of the liquid crystal orientational order parameter that exhibit emergent particle-like properties such as mutual interaction, translational motion and reconfigurable…
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…
Hopfions, as three-dimensional topologically nontrivial structures described by poloidal and toroidal winding numbers, hold promise as robust information carriers in spintronics, functional materials, and optical communications. Although…
The transport on top of a periodic two-dimensional hexagonal magnetic pattern of (i) a single macroscopic steel sphere, (ii) a doublet of wax/magnetite composite spheres, and (iii) an immiscible mixture of ferrofluid droplets with a…
Topological defects are an essential part of the structure and dynamics of all liquid crystals, and they are particularly important in experiments and simulations on active liquid crystals. In a recent paper, Vromans and Giomi [Soft Matter,…
In uniaxial soft matter with a reorientational nonlinearity, such as nematic liquid crystals, a light beam in the extraordinary polarization walks off its wavevector due to birefringence, while it undergoes self-focusing via an increase in…
Anisotropic rod-like particles form liquid crystalline phases with varying degrees of orientational and translational order. When confined geometrically, these phases can give rise to topological defects, which can be selected and…
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…
The topological understanding of nematic liquid crystals is traditionally centered on singularities, or defects, and their classification via homotopy theory. However, this approach has ultimately proved insufficient to properly capture a…
Toroidal nematics are droplets of nematic liquid crystals in the form of a circular torus. When the nematic director is subject to planar degenerate boundary conditions, the bend-only director field with vector lines along the parallels of…
Soliton molecules, bound states of two solitons, can be important for the informatics using solitons and the quest for exotic particles in a wide range of physical systems from unconventional superconductors to nuclear matter and Higgs…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
This article models experimentally observed three dimensional particle-like waves that develop in nematic liquid crystals, with negative dielectric and conductive anisotropy, when subject to an applied alternating electric field. The liquid…
The toroidal dipole is an exquisite electromagnetic momentum apart from the classical multipoles family that can be localized and squeezed in an extremely tiny spot. This mode, in optical nanosystems, can be particularly distinguished as a…
Colloidal particles in liquid crystals tend to induce topological defects and distortions of the molecular alignment within the surrounding anisotropic host medium, which results in elasticity-mediated interactions not accessible to their…
Magnetic hopfions are topologically protected three-dimensional solitons that are constituted by a tube which exhibits a topologically nontrivial spin texture in the cross-section profile and is closed to a torus. Here we show that the…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature and chiral objects in condensed matter are often excited states protected by system's topology. The use of chiral topological excitations to carry information has been demonstrated, where the information is…