Defect formation dynamics in curved elastic surface crystals
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c7sm02233f.pdf
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3.1 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Stoop, Norbert
Dunkel, Joern
Date Issued
February 2018
Journal
Soft Matter
Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
Citation
Stoop, Norbert, and Jörn Dunkel. “Defect Formation Dynamics in Curved Elastic Surface Crystals.” Soft Matter 14, 12 (2018): 2329–2338 © 2018 Royal Society of Chemistry
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Topological defects shape the material and transport properties of physical systems. Examples range from vortex lines in quantum superfluids, defect-mediated buckling of graphene, and grain boundaries in ferromagnets and colloidal crystals, to domain structures formed in the early universe. The Kibble-Zurek (KZ) mechanism describes the topological defect formation in continuous non-equilibrium phase transitions with a constant finite quench rate. Universal KZ scaling laws have been verified experimentally and numerically for second-order transitions in planar Euclidean geometries, but their validity for non-thermal transitions in curved and topologically nontrivial systems still poses open questions. Here, we use recent experimentally confirmed theory to investigate topological defect formation in curved elastic surface crystals formed by stress-quenching a bilayer material. For both spherical and toroidal crystals, we find that the defect densities follow KZ-type power laws. Moreover, the nucleation sequences agree with recent experimental observations for spherical colloidal crystals. Our results suggest that curved elastic bilayers provide an experimentally accessible macroscopic system to study universal properties of non-thermal phase transitions in non-planar geometries.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1039/C7SM02233F
