Issue 14, 2021

Electrically driven formation and dynamics of swallow-tail solitons in smectic A liquid crystals

Abstract

Electric field driven instabilities of liquid crystals, such as electro-convections, spatiotemporal chaos, backflows, and solitons are of great importance for both fundamental science and practical applications. Here we demonstrate that particle-like multidimensional solitons representing self-localized molecular director deformations can be produced in a smectic A liquid crystal by applying electric fields. These solitons are transformed from focal conic domains with a static structure topologically analogous to parabolic focal conic domains. They lack fore-aft symmetry and move perpendicular to the smectic layers and to the applied electric field direction. During motion, the solitons collide with each other and with colloidal particles and restore their speed and shape after collisions. The rich dynamic behavior and easy control of the solitons make them extremely promising for a broad range of future studies.

Graphical abstract: Electrically driven formation and dynamics of swallow-tail solitons in smectic A liquid crystals

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
17 apr. 2021
Accepted
26 maí 2021
First published
27 maí 2021
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Mater. Adv., 2021,2, 4752-4761

Electrically driven formation and dynamics of swallow-tail solitons in smectic A liquid crystals

Y. Shen and I. Dierking, Mater. Adv., 2021, 2, 4752 DOI: 10.1039/D1MA00356A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements