Related papers: String Defects in Condensed Matter Systems as Opti…
Many promising approaches for designing interactions of synthetic materials with light involve solid optical monocrystals and nanofabricated photonic crystal structures with spatially periodic variations of refractive index. Although their…
Optical modes of a multilayered photonic structure with the twisted nematic liquid crystal as a defect layer have been investigated. The electroconvective flow in the nematic makes a spatially periodic structure in the form of abnormal…
A promising approach in designing composite materials with unusual physical behavior combines solid nanostructures and orientationally ordered soft matter at the mesoscale. Such composites not only inherit properties of their constituents…
We study the behaviour of cosmic string networks in contracting universes, and discuss some of their possible consequences. We note that there is a fundamental time asymmetry between defect network evolution for an expanding universe and a…
We consider the gravitational lensing produced by long cosmic strings formed in a GUT scale phase transition. We derive a formula for the deflection of photons which pass near the strings that reduces to an integral over the light cone…
It is shown that strongly correlated electrons on frustrated lattices like pyrochlore, checkerboard or kagome lattice can lead to the appearance of closed and open strings. They are resulting from nonlocal subsidiary conditions which…
The most fundamental strings in high density color superconductivity are the non-Abelian semi-superfluid strings which have color gauge flux tube but behave as superfluid vortices in the energetic point of view. We show that in addition to…
Due to the intertwining between electronic nematic and elastic degrees of freedom, lattice defects and structural inhomogeneities commonly found in crystals can have a significant impact on the electronic properties of nematic materials.…
A flux liquid can condense into a smectic crystal in a pure layered superconductors with the magnetic field oriented nearly parallel to the layers. If the smectic order is commensurate with the layering, this crystal is {\sl stable} to…
We study the interference and diffraction of light when it propagates through a metamaterial medium mimicking the spacetime of a cosmic string, -- a topological defect with curvature singularity. The phenomenon may look like a gravitational…
Superconductors are the only experimentally accessible systems with spontaneously broken gauge symmetries which support topologically nontrivial defects, namely string defects. We propose two experiments whose aim is the observation of the…
Inspired by non-Hermitian systems, we study reflection and transmission in a stack of thin films composed by the repetition of a bipartite unit cell. We aim for controlled reflection and transmission using lossless and lossy materials in…
We study stability and distortions of liquid crystal nematic order in a cell with a random heterogeneous substrate. Modeling this system as a bulk xy model with quenched disorder confined to a surface, we find that nematic order is…
We study the deflection of light in the background of a "wiggly" cosmic string, and investigate whether it is possible to detect cosmic strings by means of weak gravitational lensing. For straight strings without small-scale structure there…
Strings are a natural representation of biological data such as DNA, RNA and protein sequences. The problem of finding a string that summarizes a set of sequences has direct application in relative compression algorithms for genome and…
We calculate the deflection of a light ray caused by the gravitational field of a cosmic string loop in the weak field limit and reduce the problem to a single quadrature over a time slice of the loop's world sheet. We then apply this…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…
Vector perturbations sourced by topological defects can generate rotations in the lensing of background galaxies. This is a potential smoking gun for the existence of defects since rotation generates a curl-like component in the weak…
One-dimensional gapped systems are often characterized by a 'hidden' non-local order parameter, the so-called string order. Due to the gap, thermodynamic properties are robust against a weak higher-dimensional coupling between such chains…
We investigate numerically the configurational statistics of strings. The algorithm models an ensemble of global $U(1)$ cosmic strings, or equivalently vortices in superfluid $^4$He. We use a new method which avoids the specification of…