Fertile metastability

ABSTRACT

We deal here with three metastable systems: 1° – the dowser texture, 2° – supertwisted cholesterics and 3° – hypotwisted cholesterics. We outline remarkable properties of the tropisms of the dowser texture stemming from its low symmetry, and we show that, using setups called Dowsons Colliders, nematic monopoles can be nucleated, set into motion and brought into collisions in the dowser texture. Subsequently, we point out that nucleation of dislocation loops occurs in cholesteric layers compressed or dilated between cylindrical mica sheets. Under compression, three modes of nucleation of dislocation loops have been identified: individual, serial and continuous. The serial mode generates dislocation nets made of L circular loops connected by C radial crossing into superloops. Similar superloops can also be generated under dilation. We analyse the topology of superloops in terms of the theory of knots and point out that they can be reduced to the unknot by Reidemeister moves. In other words, superloops are multiply folded loops that can be continuously unfolded.

Graphical abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Metastability
• dowser texture
• dislocations
• cholesterics
• knots

Acknowledgements

A new experimental setup tailored for the production of cylinder/cylinder mica wedges was built by V. Klein, J. Sanchez and S. Saranga. We benefitted from discussions with P. Oswald, O. Lavrentovich and P. Palffy-Muhoray as well from the help of I. Settouraman, M. Bottineau, J. Vieira, I. Nimaga, C. Goldmann and J. Saen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02678292.2022.2161653

Additional information

Funding

This work was co-financed by FEDER, European funds, through the COMPETE 2020 POCI and PORL, National Funds through FCT – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and POR Lisboa2020 under projects PIDDAC (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007688, Reference UIDB/50025/2020-2023).