Wittmann René, Cortes Louis B G, Löwen Hartmut, Aarts Dirk G A L
Institut für Theoretische Physik II: Weiche Materie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Department of Chemistry, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Nat Commun. 2021 Jan 27;12(1):623. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-20842-5.
Confined samples of liquid crystals are characterized by a variety of topological defects and can be exposed to external constraints such as extreme confinements with nontrivial topology. Here we explore the intrinsic structure of smectic colloidal layers dictated by the interplay between entropy and an imposed external topology. Considering an annular confinement as a basic example, a plethora of competing states is found with nontrivial defect structures ranging from laminar states to multiple smectic domains and arrays of edge dislocations, which we refer to as Shubnikov states in formal analogy to the characteristic of type-II superconductors. Our particle-resolved results, gained by a combination of real-space microscopy of thermal colloidal rods and fundamental-measure-based density functional theory of hard anisotropic bodies, agree on a quantitative level.
受限的液晶样本具有多种拓扑缺陷，并且可以受到外部约束，例如具有非平凡拓扑结构的极端限制。在这里，我们探讨了由熵与外加外部拓扑结构之间的相互作用所决定的近晶胶体层的内在结构。以环形限制作为一个基本例子，我们发现了大量相互竞争的状态，其具有从层状状态到多个近晶畴和刃型位错阵列的非平凡缺陷结构，我们将其正式类比于II型超导体的特征，称为舒布尼科夫态。我们通过热胶体棒的实空间显微镜和硬各向异性体的基于基本测量的密度泛函理论相结合获得的粒子分辨结果在定量水平上是一致的。
