2015/06/18 by A. Jaya Kumar, Jaya Kumar A., A., Jaya Kumar +4
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Materials and Mechanics #Liquid Crystal Research Advancements #Micro and Nano Robotics #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1506.05616
8 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2015/06/18 · arxiv updated 2015/06/19
Fluid membranes endowed with tangent-plane order (TPO) such as tilt- and hexatic order afford unique soft matter systems for investigating the interplay between elasticity, shape, topology, and thermal fluctuations. Using the spin-connection formulation of membrane energy we obtain equa- tions of equilibrium together with free boundary conditions for ground states of such membranes. We extend the spin-connection formulation to smectic liquid crystals with TPO and show that for chiral smectics-C* this generalization leads to experimentally verifiable consequences for dispirations having topological indices (helicities) of the same magnitude but opposite signs.