Humankind has been obsessed with knots in religion, culture and daily life for millennia,
while physicists like Gauss, Kelvin and Maxwell already involved them in models centuries …

Widely known for their uses in displays and electro-optics, liquid crystals are more than just
technological marvels. They vividly reveal the topology and structure of various solitonic and …

Control of structures in soft materials with long-range order forms the basis for applications
such as displays, liquid-crystal biosensors, tunable lenses, distributed feedback lasers …

Skyrmions are topologically protected continuous field configurations that cannot be
smoothly transformed to a uniform state. They behave like particles and give origins to the …

Electric field-induced collective reorientation of nematic molecules is of importance for
fundamental science and practical applications. This reorientation is either homogeneous …

Spatial branching processes are ubiquitous in nature, yet the mechanisms that drive their
growth may vary significantly from one system to another. In soft matter physics, chiral …

We explore spatially localized solitonic configurations of a director field, generated using
optical realignment and laser-induced heating, in frustrated chiral nematic liquid crystals …

Within the Oseen-Frank theory we derive numerically exact solutions for axisymmetric
localized states in chiral liquid crystal layers with homeotropic anchoring. These solutions …

Dynamics of small particles, both living and inanimate, has fascinated scientists for
centuries. Learning how to control it could open technological opportunities in the …

Condensed matter systems with topological defects in the ground states range from the
Abrikosov phases in superconductors, to various blue phases and twist grain boundary …