Skyrmion Tubes in achiral nematic liquid crystals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation and properties of Skyrmion Tube structures in achiral nematic liquid crystals, analyzing their configurations and transitions within a generalized free-energy framework.

Contribution

It introduces new liquid crystal configurations resembling Skyrmion Tubes and studies their equilibrium states using both numerical and analytical methods.

Findings

Identification of Skyrmion Tube-like structures in nematic liquid crystals

Analysis of phase transitions involving twist-bend and uniform nematic phases

Development of numerical solutions and analytical approximations for equilibrium configurations

Abstract

We analyze the interaction with uniform external fields of nematic liquid crystals within a recent generalized free-energy posited by Virga and falling in the class of quartic functionals in the spatial gradients of the nematic director. We review some known interesting solutions, i. e., uniform heliconical structures, which correspond to the so-called twist-bend nematic phase and we also study the transition between this phase and the standard uniform nematic one. Moreover, we find liquid crystal configurations, which closely resemble some novel, experimentally detected, structures called Skyrmion Tubes. Skyrmion Tubes are characterized by a localized cylindrically-symmetric pattern surrounded by either twist-bend or uniform nematic phase. We study the equilibrium differential equations and find numerical solutions and analytical approximations.