Abstract
Topology has an increasingly important role in the physics of condensed matter, quantum systems, material science, photonics and biology, with spectacular realizations of topological concepts in liquid crystals. Here we report on long-lived hidden topological states in thermally quenched, chiral nematic droplets, formed from string-like, triangular and polyhedral constellations of monovalent and polyvalent singular point defects. These topological defects are regularly packed into a spherical liquid volume and stabilized by the elastic energy barrier due to the helical structure and confinement of the liquid crystal in the micro-sphere. We observe, for the first time, topological three-dimensional point defects of the quantized hedgehog charge q=−2, −3. These higher-charge defects act as ideal polyvalent artificial atoms, binding the defects into polyhedral constellations representing topological molecules.
Highlights
Topology has an increasingly important role in the physics of condensed matter, quantum systems, material science, photonics and biology, with spectacular realizations of topological concepts in liquid crystals
Several spectacular realizations of topological concepts have been demonstrated in Liquid crystals (LCs), such as topological charge creation and manipulation in nematic liquid crystals (NLCs)[14,15,16], and fascinating defect motion in active NLCs11,12
The complexity of the topological states in chiral nematic droplets depends on the chirality parameter N 1⁄4 2d/p0, where d is the diameter of the droplet and p0 is the intrinsic pitch of the chiral nematic LC
Summary
Topology has an increasingly important role in the physics of condensed matter, quantum systems, material science, photonics and biology, with spectacular realizations of topological concepts in liquid crystals. We report on long-lived hidden topological states in thermally quenched, chiral nematic droplets, formed from string-like, triangular and polyhedral constellations of monovalent and polyvalent singular point defects. These topological defects are regularly packed into a spherical liquid volume and stabilized by the elastic energy barrier due to the helical structure and confinement of the liquid crystal in the micro-sphere. In chiral nematic liquid crystals, topological monopoles of unit charge are stabilized by the spontaneous winding of the nematic orientational field, which forms skyrmion-like twisted three-dimensional (3D) structures called torons[28,29,30]. Theory predicted the existence of linked and knotted loop defects in chiral nematic droplets[33], but such topological states have not yet been confirmed
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