Abstract
Investigations on solitons have been carried out for decades in various areas of physics, such as nonlinear photonics, magnetic matter and superconductors. However, producing multidimensional solitary states and manipulation of their motion are still big challenges. In this work, we describe the formation of dynamic multidimensional solitons in a nematic and a cholesteric liquid crystal (LC). These solitons are self-confined director perturbations that propagate rapidly through the LC bulk and preserve their identities after collisions. We tune the velocity of the solitons by electric fields and control their trajectories through alignment layers. We find that the chirality of the cholesteric LC endows the solitons a wave-particle duality, and leads to a variety of fascinating interactions between solitons which cannot be observed in the achiral nematic LC. Furthermore, we also show that these solitons can be used as vehicles for 2D delivery of micro-cargos.
Highlights
Investigations on solitons have been carried out for decades in various areas of physics, such as nonlinear photonics, magnetic matter and superconductors
Most early studies[11,12,13,14,15] were concerned with “walls” in nematics generated by magnetic fields, which are transition regions where the liquid crystal (LC) director smoothly reorients by π
A rectangular alternating current (AC) field E is applied to the cell perpendicular to the xy plane of the sample (Fig. 1a) so that the sandwich cell acts as a plate capacitor
Summary
Investigations on solitons have been carried out for decades in various areas of physics, such as nonlinear photonics, magnetic matter and superconductors. We describe the formation of dynamic multidimensional solitons in a nematic and a cholesteric liquid crystal (LC) These solitons are self-confined director perturbations that propagate rapidly through the LC bulk and preserve their identities after collisions. The so-called (3 + 2)D solitons, where “3” refers to the 3D spatial self-confinement and “2” specifies propagation directions that are either perpendicular or parallel to the alignment direction, were observed in a NLC by Lavrentovich et al.[29,30] These formations are nonsingular bow-like director perturbations that propagate rapidly through a slab of a uniformly aligned NLC and survive collisions with each other[30,31]. We show that the trajectories of their motion can be controlled by a predesignated alignment pattern allowing the realization of microcargo transport by soliton motion
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