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Updated: May 9, 2026

Novel Techniques for Observing Structural Dynamics of Photoresponsive Liquid Crystals
Published on: May 29, 2018
Disclination classes, fractional excitations, and the melting of quantum liquid crystals
Sarang Gopalakrishnan1, Jeffrey C Y Teo, Taylor L Hughes
1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
We consider how fractional excitations bound to a dislocation evolve as the dislocation is separated into a pair of disclinations. We show that some dislocation-bound excitations (such as Majorana modes and half-quantum vortices) are possible only if the elementary dislocation consists of two inequivalent disclinations, as is the case for stripes or square lattices but not for triangular lattices. The existence of multiple inequivalent disclination classes governs the two-dimensional melting of quantum liquid crystals (i.e., nematics and hexatics), determining whether superfluidity and orientational order can simultaneously vanish at a continuous transition.
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