1. Dislocations and other topological oddities.
- Author
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Pieranski, Pawel
- Subjects
- *
LIQUID crystals , *NONFICTION - Abstract
We will show that the book Dislocations by Jacques Friedel, published half a century ago, can still be recommended, in agreement with the author's intention, as a textbook “ for research students at University and for students at engineering schools as well as for research engineers ”. Indeed, today dislocations are known to occur not only in solid crystals but also in many other systems discovered more recently such as colloidal crystals or liquid crystals having periodic structures. Moreover, the concept of dislocations is an excellent starting point for lectures on topological defects occurring in systems equipped with order parameters resulting from broken symmetries: disclinations in nematic or hexatic liquid crystals, dispirations in chiral smectics or disorientations in lyotropic liquid crystals. The discussion of dislocations in Blue Phases will give us an opportunity to call on mind Sir Charles Frank, friend of Jacques Friedel since his Bristol years, who called these ephemeral mesophases “topological oddities”. Being made of networks of disclinations, Blue Phases are similar to Twist Grain Boundary (TGB) smectic phases, which are made of networks of screw dislocations and whose existence was predicted by de Gennes in 1972 on the basis of the analogy between smectics and superconductors. We will stress that the book by Jacques Friedel contains seeds of this analogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
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