Surface anchoring as a control parameter for stabilizing torons, skyrmions, twisted walls, fingers and their hybrids in chiral nematics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how surface boundary conditions in chiral nematic liquid crystals can be used to control and stabilize various topological solitons like skyrmions, torons, and twisted walls, enabling their systematic manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control soliton structures via boundary conditions, combining numerical modeling and 3D imaging to map stability and transformations.

Findings

Surface anchoring controls soliton topology and stability.

Structural stability diagrams for various solitons are provided.

Controlled creation of hybrid solitonic structures is demonstrated.

Abstract

Chiral condensed matter systems, such as liquid crystals and magnets, exhibit a host of spatially localized topological structures that emerge from the medium's tendency to twist and its competition with confinement and field coupling effects. We show that the strength of perpendicular surface boundary conditions can be used to control the structure and topology of solitonic and other localized field configurations. By combining numerical modeling and three-dimensional imaging of the director field, we reveal structural stability diagrams and inter-transformation of twisted walls and fingers, torons and skyrmions and their crystalline organizations upon changing boundary conditions. Our findings provide a recipe for controllably realizing skyrmions, torons and hybrid solitonic structures possessing features of both of them, which will aid in fundamental explorations and technological uses of such topological solitons. Moreover, we discuss how other material parameters can be used to determine soliton stability, and how similar principles can be systematically applied to other liquid crystal solitons, and solitons in other material systems.