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University of Birmingham > Talks@bham > Theoretical Physics Seminars > Contact geometry in cholesterics and chiral materials
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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Hannah Price. Chirality in materials, such as liquid crystals, often entails a high degree of geometric frustration, leading to a rich array of morphological phenomena. Here I will discuss how methods from contact geometry and topology can be used to give a qualitative understanding of the behaviour of chiral materials. Using experiments on cylindrically confined lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals as a model system, I will show how contact topology-theoretic methods lead to a topological description of the various metastable minima in the energy landscape, as well as explaining the existence of novel chirally-protected solitons. I will further show how the same perspective can be used to understand the structural stability of highly-twisted Skyrmions in chiral ferromagnets, with applications to racetrack memory devices. Finally, I will present the results of transition path sampling calculations describing generic features of chiral morphological transitions in liquid crystalline systems. This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series. This talk is included in these lists:Note that ex-directory lists are not shown. |
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