Zigzag line defects and manipulation of colloids in a nematic liquid crystal in microwrinkle grooves.

ABSTRACT: Spatially confined liquid crystals exhibit non-uniform alignment, often accompanied by self-organised topological defects of non-trivial shape in response to imposed boundary conditions and geometry. Here we show that a nematic liquid crystal, when confined in a sinusoidal microwrinkle groove, exhibits a new periodic arrangement of twist deformations and a zigzag line defect. This periodic ordering results from the inherent liquid crystal elastic anisotropy and the antagonistic boundary conditions at the flat liquid crystal-air and the curved liquid crystal-groove interfaces. The periodic structure can be tuned by controlling the groove geometry and the molecular chirality, which demonstrates the importance of boundary conditions and introduced asymmetry for the engineering of topological

SUBMITTER: Ohzono T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3293426 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature