SKM 2021 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SYCL: Symposium Curvilinear condensed matter

SYCL 1: Curvilinear condensed matter 1

SYCL 1.1: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 29. September 2021, 10:00–10:30, Audimax 2

Curvature Effects and Topological Defects in Chiral Condensed and Soft Matter — •Avadh Saxena — Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Lab, USA

The interplay of geometry and topology underlies many novel and intriguing properties of a variety of hard and soft materials including chiral magnets, nematic liquid crystals, and biological vesicles. These materials harbor a gamut of topological defects ranging from domain walls, dislocations, disclinations, solitons, vortices, skyrmions and merons to monopoles, Dirac strings, hopfions and boojums among many others. I will illustrate this rich interplay with three distinct physical examples. (i) Curvature induced quantum potential on minimal surfaces such as helicoids and catenoids (ii) Controlled motion and confinement of liquid crystal skyrmions near curved boundaries using the Q-tensor (as opposed to director) based free energy where the twist acts as the analogue of Dzyloshinskii-Moriya interaction in chiral magnets. (iii) Deformation of biological membranes and vesicles using Canham-Helfrich free energy and Bogomolnyi decomposition technique to determine equilibrium shapes. Finally, I will briefly describe specific applications of these ideas in memory devices, drug delivery systems as well as active matter and nonlinear relativistic systems.