Journal
NATURE MATERIALS
Volume 9, Issue 2, Pages 139-145Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NMAT2592
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM)
- NSF [DMR 0645461, DMR 0820579, DMR 0847782, DMR 0844115]
- University of Colorado Innovation Seed
- Division Of Materials Research
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [844115, 0820579, 0847782] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Control of structures in soft materials with long-range order forms the basis for applications such as displays, liquid-crystal biosensors, tunable lenses, distributed feedback lasers, muscle-like actuators and beam-steering devices. Bistable, tristable and multistable switching of well-defined structures of molecular alignment is of special interest for all of these applications. Here we describe the facile optical creation and multistable switching of localized configurations in the molecular orientation field of a chiral nematic anisotropic fluid. These localized chiro-elastic particle-like excitations-dubbed 'triple- twist torons'-are generated by vortex laser beams and embed the localized three-dimensional (3D) twist into a uniform background. Confocal polarizing microscopy and computer simulations reveal their equilibrium internal structures, manifesting both skyrmion-like and Hopf fibration features. Robust generation of torons at predetermined locations combined with both optical and electrical reversible switching can lead to new ways of multistable structuring of complex photonic architectures in soft materials.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available