Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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SYCL: Symposium Curvilinear condensed matter

SYCL 1: Curvilinear Condensed Matter

SYCL 1.5: Invited Talk

Friday, March 20, 2020, 11:45–12:15, HSZ 02

Effect of Curvature on Topological Defects in Chiral Condensed and Soft Matter — •Avadh Saxena — 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) Either the change in the underlying curved manifold or the variation of the Dzyloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) with curvature in magnetic systems. (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 DMI. (iii) Deformation of biological membranes and vesicles using Canham-Helfrich free energy and Bogomol*nyi decomposition technique to determine equilibrium shapes. Finally, I will briefly describe specific applications of these ideas in spintronics, memory devices, drug delivery systems as well as active matter and nonlinear relativistic systems.