Abstract
Optical microscopy reveals that blue phases---molecularly ordered liquids---consist of filaments with vortexlike cross sections known as skyrmions, whirls in a material, with possible information-storage applications.
Highlights
Proposed to describe the stability of the constituents of elementary particles [1], skyrmions are vortexlike formations of a field appearing in a number of different systems [2]
To shed more light on the nature of the phase boundaries between the different skyrmion phases in the ðd; TÞ phase diagram in Fig. 5(e), we explore the temperature and thickness dependence of the nematic order-parameter (OP) dynamics using cross-differential dynamic microscopy in very thin layers of the sample and comparing it to the OP dynamics in bulk BPIII, obtained by dynamic light scattering (DLS) (Fig. 2)
We present experiments and numerical simulations, which show that the BPIII of chiral liquid crystals is a dynamical tangle of double-twist filaments and disclination defect lines, which, when confined to very thin layers, disentangle into a 2D liquid of half-skyrmions
Summary
Proposed to describe the stability of the constituents of elementary particles [1], skyrmions are vortexlike formations of a field appearing in a number of different systems [2]. When skyrmions are elongated into filaments, the double-twist cylinders (DTCs) are formed, which are proposed to form thermodynamically stable blue phases I and II (BPI and BPII) [18] of highly chiral LC materials. In chiral LCs, half-skyrmions are observed in thin layers of BPI LCs, where they form a hexagonal 2D crystal, and appear as isolated objects [23]. We show that the BPIII of a chiral liquid crystal is a dynamic, 3D liquid phase of skyrmion filaments (i.e., double-twist filaments) of the nematic orientational field nðrÞ, entangled with a 3D network of singular topological defect lines. Landau–de Gennes modeling of skyrmion structures is described in Sec. V, which, together with optical simulation of their appearance under an optical microscope, is in full agreement with experiments, further confirming that BPIII is a 3D topological liquid of skyrmion filaments. VII possible application of BP skyrmions, presenting the competing advantages of soft matter skyrmionics over the magnetic skyrmions in solid state
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