Particle-resolved topological defects of smectic colloidal liquid crystals in extreme confinement

Abstract

Confined samples of liquid crystals are characterized by a variety of topological defects and can be exposed to external constraints such as extreme confinements with nontrivial topology. Here we explore the intrinsic structure of smectic colloidal layers dictated by the interplay between entropy and an imposed external topology. Considering an annular confinement as a basic example, a plethora of competing states is found with nontrivial defect structures ranging from laminar states to multiple smectic domains and arrays of edge dislocations which we refer to as Shubnikov states in formal analogy to the characteristic of type-II superconductors. Our particle-resolved results, gained by a combination of real-space microscopy of thermal colloidal rods and fundamental-measure-based density functional theory of hard anisotropic bodies, agree on a quantitative level.

Extended version of the article with integrated Supplementary Information. Published article available at https://rdcu.be/ceicY

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Defect patterns of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystals in confinement
• Smectic Layering: Landau theory for a complex-tensor order parameter
• Effect of clustering on the orientational properties of a fluid of hard right isosceles triangles
• The effect of combined roundness and polydispersity on the phase behavior of hard-rectangle fluids
• Topology of orientational defects in confined smectic liquid crystals