Orientational properties of nematic disclinations

Abstract

Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as point-like objects, recent experimental studies on active nematics have suggested that half-strength disclinations might in fact possess a polar structure. In this article, we provide a precise definition of polarity for half-strength nematic disclinations, we introduce a simple and robust method to calculate this quantity from experimental and numerical data and we investigate how the orientational properties of half-strength disclinations affect their relaxational dynamics.

6 pages, 5 figures, supplementary movies at http://wwwhome.lorentz.leidenuniv.nl/~giomi/sup_mat/20150720/

References in corpus (6)

• Topology and Dynamics of Active Nematic Vesicles
• Topological colloids
• Orientational order of motile defects in active nematics
• Defect dynamics in active nematics
• Nematic textures in spherical shells
• Stabilization of active matter by flow-vortex lattices and defect ordering

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