Figure 2
Metastable twisted textures around colloidal particles with degenerate planar surface anchoring.
(a), (b), (e), (f): A structure, recognized as a toron, bound to a colloidal particle. (c), (d), (g), (h): A hopfion, bound to a colloidal particle. Viewed between crossed polarizers (a), (c), the structures swirl in opposite directions due to different vertical particle positions. Cross sections with circularly polarized 3PEF-PM (b), (d) reveal existence of a bulk point defect only for the toron structure. (e), (f), (g), (h) show the regions of maximum intensity of linearly polarized 3PEF-PM signal for two perpendicular polarizations, extracted from numerical modeling and experimental imaging. Notice that the toron structure has a detached defect (e), (f), while the hopfion has just a surface boojum (g),(h). The diameter of particles is 7 μm.
