Abstract
Skyrmions have attracted rapidly growing interest due to their topological properties and unique aspects for potential novel applications such as data storage and soft robotics. They can also serve as key elements for materials by design, self-assembly, and functional soft materials. While not real particles, these skyrmions behave like particles—they interact with each other and can be actuated by means of electric field, surface anchoring, and light. On the other hand, they are field configurations which have properties not possessed by real particles. Here we show that, by means of alignment-induced attractive and repulsive walls, skyrmions in chiral nematic liquid crystals can be precisely controlled and programed to serve as suitable building blocks for the realization of the above goals. Our work may stimulate new experimental efforts and concomitant applications in this direction.Received 29 July 2020Revised 1 November 2020Accepted 18 December 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.L012005Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasApplications of soft matterChiralityConfinementDielectric propertiesTopological defectsPhysical SystemsCholesteric liquid crystalsTechniquesDissipative particle dynamicsLangevin algorithmPolymers & Soft MatterCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics
Highlights
Richard Feynman pointed out that control of things on a small scale would have great impact on customizing material properties and advance nanotechnology [1]
Skyrmions are particle-like topological field configurations which were originally proposed as field configurations in particle physics [2], and later their realization in magnetic systems attracted much attention and extensive research has uncovered many complex features of magnetic skyrmions [3,4]
In liquid crystal (LC), full skyrmions are suitable for individual design and manipulation due to their particle-like properties; they exist as isolated objects [8] and, when not tilted, they interact with other skyrmions like local soft repulsive particles [11,12] unlike other structures such as merons that are accompanied by topological defects and are generally reported to exist as lattices [13,14,15,16,17]
Summary
Richard Feynman pointed out that control of things on a small scale would have great impact on customizing material properties and advance nanotechnology [1]. Additional properties lacked by real particles provide an even richer set of tools as skyrmions can be generated and decimated at will, are flexible and readily deformable, and their interaction can be switched between isotropic-repulsive and directional-attractive [11]. Novel mechanisms such as oscillating electric fields have been shown to drive particle-like excitations, for example static skyrmions [18] and solitary waves [19,20]. We present simulations accompanied by an analytical calculation in the Supplemental Material (SM) [22] to illustrate that obstacles with dynamically controllable size can be achieved when voltage across small electrodes is used as the
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