Dynamics of electrically driven solitons in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals

Abstract

Investigations on solitons have been carried out for decades in various areas of physics, such as nonlinear photonics, magnetic matter and superconductors. However, producing multidimensional solitary states and manipulation of their motion are still big challenges. In this work, we describe the formation of dynamic multidimensional solitons in a nematic and a cholesteric liquid crystal (LC). These solitons are self-confined director perturbations that propagate rapidly through the LC bulk and preserve their identities after collisions. We tune the velocity of the solitons by electric fields and control their trajectories through alignment layers. We find that the chirality of the cholesteric LC endows the solitons a wave-particle duality, and leads to a variety of fascinating interactions between solitons which cannot be observed in the achiral nematic LC. Furthermore, we also show that these solitons can be used as vehicles for 2D delivery of micro-cargos.

Generating and manipulating solitons in more than one dimension is a major challenge in nonlinear matter physics. This paper reports an experimental investigation of the structure, generation, dynamic behaviour, and manipulation of multidimensional solitons in cholesteric liquid crystals