Knots and other new topological effects in liquid crystals and colloids

II Smalyukh - Reports on Progress in Physics, 2020‏ - iopscience.iop.org
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 …

Hopfions, heliknotons, skyrmions, torons and both abelian and nonabelian vortices in chiral liquid crystals

JS Wu, II Smalyukh - Liquid Crystals Reviews, 2022‏ - Taylor & Francis
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 light by topological solitons in soft chiral birefringent media

AJ Hess, G Poy, JSB Tai, S Žumer, II Smalyukh - Physical Review X, 2020‏ - APS
In practically all branches of physics, different types of solitons, with a number of them
enjoying topological protection, are found. Here we explore how one-and two-dimensional …

Discrimination of chiral and helical contributions to Raman scattering of liquid crystals using vortex beams

S Müllner, F Büscher, A Möller, P Lemmens - Physical Review Letters, 2022‏ - APS
We use vortex photon fields with orbital and spin angular momentum to probe chiral
fluctuations within liquid crystals. In the regime of iridescence with a well-defined pitch …

Dynamics of topological solitons, knotted streamlines, and transport of cargo in liquid crystals

HRO Sohn, PJ Ackerman, TJ Boyle, GH Sheetah… - Physical Review E, 2018‏ - APS
Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically
supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging …

Topological solitons, cholesteric fingers and singular defect lines in Janus liquid crystal shells

G Durey, HRO Sohn, PJ Ackerman, E Brasselet… - Soft Matter, 2020‏ - pubs.rsc.org
Topological solitons are non-singular but topologically nontrivial structures in fields, which
have fundamental significance across various areas of physics, similar to singular defects …

Recent progresses on experimental investigations of topological and dissipative solitons in liquid crystals

Y Shen, I Dierking - Crystals, 2022‏ - mdpi.com
Solitons in liquid crystals have received increasing attention due to their importance in
fundamental physical science and potential applications in various fields. The study of …

Minimizers of the Landau–de Gennes energy around a spherical colloid particle

S Alama, L Bronsard, X Lamy - Archive for Rational Mechanics and …, 2016‏ - Springer
We consider energy minimizing configurations of a nematic liquid crystal around a spherical
colloid particle, in the context of the Landau–de Gennes model. The nematic is assumed to …

Topology-commanded optical properties of bistable electric-field-induced torons in cholesteric bubble domains

A Varanytsia, G Posnjak, U Mur, V Joshi, K Darrah… - Scientific reports, 2017‏ - nature.com
Nowadays, complicated topological defects enable many experimental manipulations and
configurational simulations of active soft matter for optical and photonic applications …

Dynamics of flowing 2D skyrmions

RCV Coelho, M Tasinkevych… - Journal of Physics …, 2021‏ - iopscience.iop.org
We investigate, numerically, the effects of externally imposed material flows on the structure
and temporal evolution of liquid crystal (LC) skyrmions. The dynamics of a 2D system of …