Skyrmion Tubes in achiral nematic liquid crystals
arXiv:2105.11474 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.105.024701
Abstract
We analyze the interaction with uniform external fields of nematic liquid crystals within a recent generalized free-energy posited by Virga and falling in the class of quartic functionals in the spatial gradients of the nematic director. We review some known interesting solutions, i. e., uniform heliconical structures, which correspond to the so-called twist-bend nematic phase and we also study the transition between this phase and the standard uniform nematic one. Moreover, we find liquid crystal configurations, which closely resemble some novel, experimentally detected, structures called Skyrmion Tubes. Skyrmion Tubes are characterized by a localized cylindrically-symmetric pattern surrounded by either twist-bend or uniform nematic phase. We study the equilibrium differential equations and find numerical solutions and analytical approximations.
23 pages, 11 figures. v2: published version
References in corpus (4)
- Two-dimensional skyrmions and other solitonic structures in confinement-frustrated chiral nematics
- Electrooptic response of chiral nematic with oblique helicoidal director
- Twist-bend nematic liquid crystals in high magnetic fields
- Interpretation of saddle-splay and the Oseen-Frank free energy in liquid crystals