Programmable collective motion of polar solitons in chiral liquid crystals

Collective motion is a fundamental mode of organization in systems ranging from biological assemblies to driven physical media. Reproducing and controlling such behavior in soft-matter systems remains challenging, as soliton-soliton interactions are often symmetric, which tends to confine collective dynamics to predominantly repulsive motion. Here, we demonstrate that soliton ensembles can be reversibly switched among disordered, linear, and circular motion by electrical control, enabling regulation of soliton population, velocity, and trajectories. Circular motion stabilizes soliton populations while retaining information about earlier trajectories, allowing partial recovery of the original motional state. Under suitably designed electric-field configurations, localized many-body motion can also be achieved. These results establish a controllable route to collective dynamics based on localized solitonic textures and suggest general design principles for programmable self-organization in soft matter, with potential relevance to reconfigurable photonic structures and other driven many-body systems.