Séminaire Programme Gradué Chimie PSL

The seminar will be in hybrid format and the connection details are : 



https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83595816412?pwd=Q1VNbEdPcFMvNm9rSkpXRFRSZmlTUT09



ID de réunion : 835 9581 6412

Code secret : 399084

 

Next Monday at 11:30, we will have the pleasure to listen to Thomas Machon (Bristol University) who will talk about the contact geometry in cholesterics and chiral materials . You will find the abstract below.

 

Chirality in materials, such as liquid crystals, often entails a high degree of frustration, leading to a rich array of morphological phenomena. Here I will discuss how methods from contact geometry and topology can be used to give a qualitative understanding of the behaviour of chiral materials. Using experiments on cylindrically confined lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals as a model system, I will show how contact topology-theoretic methods lead to a topological description of the various metastable minima in the energy landscape, as well as explaining the existence of novel chirally-protected solitons. I will further show how the same perspective can be used to understand the structural stability of highly-twisted Skyrmions in chiral ferromagnets, with applications to racetrack memory devices. Finally, I will present the results of transition path sampling calculations describing generic features of chiral morphological transitions in liquid crystalline systems.