Instituut-Lorentz, Universiteit Leiden, P.O. Box 9506, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands.
Soft Matter. 2016 Aug 14;12(30):6490-5. doi: 10.1039/c6sm01146b. Epub 2016 Jul 15.
Topological defects play a pivotal role in the physics of liquid crystals and represent one of the most prominent and well studied aspects of mesophases. While in two-dimensional nematics, disclinations are traditionally treated as point-like objects, recent experimental studies on active nematics have suggested that half-strength disclinations might in fact possess a polar structure. In this article, we provide a precise definition of polarity for half-strength nematic disclinations, we introduce a simple and robust method to calculate this quantity from experimental and numerical data and we investigate how the orientational properties of half-strength disclinations affect their relaxational dynamics.
拓扑缺陷在液晶物理学中起着关键作用，是介相研究中最突出和研究最广泛的方面之一。在二维向列相中，传统上认为位错是点状物体，而最近关于活性向列相的实验研究表明，半强度位错实际上可能具有极性结构。在本文中，我们为半强度向列相位错提供了极性的精确定义，我们引入了一种简单而强大的方法，从实验和数值数据中计算这个量，并研究了半强度位错的取向性质如何影响它们的弛豫动力学。
