Order on curved geometries with free boundaries: defects in layered systems Seminar

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. We obtain equations of equilibrium together with free boundary conditions for ground states of such systems and extend the formulation to smectic liquid crystals with TPO. We 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.