New article on defect dynamics in cholesteric liquid crystals

In collaboration with French and US researchers, the NOVA team published an article in Soft Matter titled A skyrmionic topology perspective on Lehmann clusters. The paper shows that in cholesteric liquid crystals, defects that would normally annihilate can instead form stable bound structures through three-dimensional reorientation of the director field, revealing a topology-governed mechanism for robust, long-lived defect states. Such defect stabilisation provides key insight into how stress- and flow-driven director reconfiguration can be controlled. This control over defect dynamics is crucial for the programmable patterning of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) using complex director-field architectures.

Download the (open access) article here.