Coarsening of Topological Defect Systems in Freely-Suspended Smectic-C Films

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/4f16c430d

Abstract

Mechanically quenching a smectic-C (SmC) liquid crystal film produces a dense array of topological defects in the film. These defects interact and annihilate in a process called `coarsening' which has been captured in high temporal resolution using depolarized reflected light microscopy. A convolutional neural network as well as a binary classification network are used to obtain the trajectories and topological charges of the defects in the film and the coarsening dynamics have been compared to results from theoretical as well as simulated studies. Subsequently, we model the quenched film as a system of charged interacting and diffusing charges, as well as simulate the $c$-director field in quenched SmC films using the XY model. Finally, the dynamics of a mutually annihilating pair of defects is considered and has been compared to results from theory as well as other experiments.

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