Equilibrium of fluid membranes with tangent-plane order (TPO), elasticity of smectics with TPO, and dispiration asymmetry in smectics-C*
Equilibrium of fluid membranes with tangent-plane order (TPO), elasticity of smectics with TPO, and dispiration asymmetry in smectics-C*
- Event time: 11:30am
- Event date: 4th November 2015
- Speaker: Buddhapriya Chakrabarti (Durham University)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
Fluid membranes endowed with tangent-plane order (TPO) such as tilt- and hexatic order afford unique soft matter systems for investigating the interplay between elasticity, shape, topology, and thermal fluctuations. Using the spin-connection formulation of membrane energy we obtain equa- tions of equilibrium together with free boundary conditions for ground states of such membranes. We extend the spin-connection formulation to smectic liquid crystals with TPO and show that for chiral smectics-C* this generalization leads to experimentally verifiable consequences for dispirations having topological indices (helicities) of the same magnitude but opposite signs.
About Statistical Physics and Complexity Group meetings
This is a weekly series of webinars on theoretical aspects of Condensed Matter, Biological, and Statistical Physics. It is open to anyone interested in research in these areas..
Find out more about Statistical Physics and Complexity Group meetings.