Search results for "Topological defect"
showing 10 items of 22 documents
Structural, chemical and dynamical trends in graphene grain boundaries
2010
Grain boundaries are topological defects that often have a disordered character. Disorder implies that understanding general trends is more important than accurate investigations of individual grain boundaries. Here we present trends in the grain boundaries of graphene. We use density-functional tight-binding method to calculate trends in energy, atomic structure (polygon composition), chemical reactivity (dangling bond density), corrugation heights (inflection angles), and dynamical properties (vibrations), as a function of lattice orientation mismatch. The observed trends and their mutual interrelations are plausibly explained by structure, and supported by past experiments.
ChemInform Abstract: Tuning the Defect Configurations in Nematic and Smectic Liquid Crystalline Shells
2013
Thin liquid crystalline shells surrounding and surrounded by aqueous phases can be conveniently produced using a nested capillary microfluidic system, as was first demonstrated by Fernandez-Nieves et al. in 2007. By choosing particular combinations of stabilizers in the internal and external phases, different types of alignment, uniform or hybrid, can be ensured within the shell. Here, we investigate shells in the nematic and smectic phases under varying boundary conditions, focusing in particular on textural transformations during phase transitions, on the interaction between topological defects in the director field and inclusions in the liquid crystal (LC), and on the possibility to relo…
HIGH-PRECISION MONTE CARLO DETERMINATION OF α/ν IN THE 3D CLASSICAL HEISENBERG MODEL
1994
To study the role of topological defects in the three-dimensional classical Heisenberg model we have simulated this model on simple cubic lattices of size up to 803, using the single-cluster Monte Carlo update. Analysing the specific-heat data of these simulations, we obtain a very accurate estimate for the ratio of the specific-heat exponent with the correlation-length exponent, α/ν, from a usual finite-size scaling analysis at the critical coupling Kc. Moreover, by fitting the energy at Kc, we reduce the error estimates by another factor of two, and get a value of α/ν, which is comparable in accuracy to best field theoretic estimates.
Topological–chiral magnetic interactions driven by emergent orbital magnetism
2019
Two hundred years ago, Ampère discovered that electric loops in which currents of electrons are generated by a penetrating magnetic field can mutually interact. Here we show that Ampère’s observation can be transferred to the quantum realm of interactions between triangular plaquettes of spins on a lattice, where the electrical currents at the atomic scale are associated with the orbital motion of electrons in response to the non-coplanarity of neighbouring spins playing the role of a magnetic field. The resulting topological orbital moment underlies the relation of the orbital dynamics with the topology of the spin structure. We demonstrate that the interactions of the topological orbital …
Towards tunable defect arrangements in smectic liquid crystal shells utilizing the nematic–smectic transition in hybrid-aligned geometries
2012
We produce and investigate liquid crystal shells with hybrid alignment—planar at one boundary, homeotropic at the other—undergoing a transition between the nematic (N) and smectic-A (SmA) phases. The shells display a dynamic sequence of patterns, the details depending on the alignment agents and on the diameter and thickness of the shell. In shells of sufficient diameter we typically find a transient striped texture near the N–SmA transition, stabilising into a pattern of tiled, more or less regularly spaced focal conic domains in the SmA phase. The domain size and spacing decrease with reduced shell thickness. In case of strong homeotropic anchoring at one boundary and small shell size, ho…
Curvature as a Guiding Field for Patterns in Thin Block Copolymer Films
2018
Experimental data on thin films of cylinder-forming block copolymers (BC)—free-standing BCmembranes as well as supported BC films—strongly suggest that the local orientation of the BC patternsis coupled to the geometry in which the patterns are embedded. We analyze this phenomenon using generalsymmetry considerations and numerical self-consistent field studies of curved BC films in cylindricalgeometry. The stability of the films against curvature-induced dewetting is also analyzed. In goodagreement with experiments, we find that the BC cylinders tend to align along the direction of curvature athigh curvatures. At low curvatures, we identify a transition from perpendicular to parallel alignm…
Self-assembly of semiflexible polymers confined to thin spherical shells
2018
Confinement effects are critical for stiff macromolecules in biological cells, vesicles, and other systems in soft matter. For these molecules, the competition between the packing entropy and the enthalpic cost of bending is further shaped by strong confinement effects. Through coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations, we explore the self-assembly of semiflexible polymers confined in thin spherical shells for various chain lengths, chain stiffnesses, and shell thicknesses. Here, we focus on the case where the contour and persistence length of the polymers are comparable to the radius of the confining cavity. The range of ordered structures is analyzed using several order parameters to …
New generation low-energy probes for ultralight axion and scalar dark matter
2017
We present a brief overview of a new generation of high-precision laboratory and astrophysical measurements to search for ultralight (sub-eV) axion, axion-like pseudoscalar and scalar dark matter, which form either a coherent condensate or topological defects (solitons). In these new detection methods, the sought effects are linear in the interaction constant between dark matter and ordinary matter, which is in stark contrast to traditional searches for dark matter, where the sought effects are quadratic or higher order in the underlying interaction constants (which are extremely small).
Tuning the defect configurations in nematic and smectic liquid crystalline shells
2013
Thin liquid crystalline shells surrounding and surrounded by aqueous phases can be conveniently produced using a nested capillary microfluidic system, as was first demonstrated by Fernandez-Nieves et al. in 2007. By choosing particular combinations of stabilizers in the internal and external phases, different types of alignment, uniform or hybrid, can be ensured within the shell. Here, we investigate shells in the nematic and smectic phases under varying boundary conditions, focusing in particular on textural transformations during phase transitions, on the interaction between topological defects in the director field and inclusions in the liquid crystal (LC), and on the possibility to rel…
Stadnik and Flambaum Reply:
2016
In the comment of Avelino, Sousa and Lobo [arXiv:1506.06028], it is argued, by comparing the kinetic energy of a topological defect with the overall energy of a pulsar, that the origin of the pulsar glitch phenomenon due to the passage of networks of topological defects through pulsars is faced with serious difficulties. Here, we point out that topological defects may trigger pulsar glitches within traditional scenarios, such as vortex unpinning. If the energy transfer from a topological defect exceeds the activation energy for a single pinned vortex, this may lead to an avalanche of unpinning of vortices and consequently a pulsar glitch, and therefore the source of angular momentum and ene…