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arXiv · 1506.05616

Equilibrium of fluid membranes with tangent-plane order (TPO), elasticity of smectics with TPO, and dispiration asymmetry in smectics-C*

Jaya Kumar A.·Buddhapriya Chakrabarti·Yashodhan Hatwalne
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Abstract

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.

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Jaya Kumar A., Buddhapriya Chakrabarti, Yashodhan Hatwalne. 2015-06-18. Equilibrium of fluid membranes with tangent-plane order (TPO), elasticity of smectics with TPO, and dispiration asymmetry in smectics-C*. https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05616

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