New Communications Physics paper: Liquid crystal skyrmions as elastic multipoles
A team including WPI-SKCM² Visiting Professor Mykola Tasinkevych has published a new paper titled “Liquid crystal skyrmions as elastic multipoles” in Communications Physics.
Chiral liquid crystals enable a large variety of thermodynamically stable topological solitons, which are topologically protected localised distortions of the director field. These solitons exhibit emergent particle-like properties such as mutual interaction, translational motion and reconfigurable self-assembling behaviour in oscillating electric fields.
Despite an extensive body of experimental research, understanding the many-body dynamics of liquid crystal solitons remains a challenge. Existing numerical investigations are limited to a small number of skyrmions and exploit pure relaxational dynamics to track the temporal evolution of the director field.
To address this challenge, first author Allison W. Teixeira and collaborators worked to develop an analytical model capable of addressing out-of-equilibrium collective dynamics of topological solitons in liquid crystals.
Teixeira was the inaugural fellow of the InternKNOTship Program, a research exchange at Hiroshima University that supports collaboration with WPI-SKCM² researchers.
Their model considers only relaxational dynamics of the director in two dimensions and neglects any material flows. For systems with negative dielectric anisotropy, the authors derive analytically elastic multipole potentials, which for symmetric skyrmions are exponentially screened. This corresponds, in an effective way, to the confinement-induced screening of toron interactions in three dimensions.
The model presented may serve as a benchmark for future theoretical developments on solitons’ out-of-equilibrium dynamics, for example by incorporating higher-order elastic multipoles or many-body interactions.
This work contributes to ongoing research at WPI-SKCM² aimed at understanding topological and chiral phenomena across scales and systems.
Paper information:
Title: Liquid crystal skyrmions as elastic multipoles (Communications Physics, 2026)
Authors: Allison W. Teixeira; Cristóvão S. Dias; Mykola Tasinkevych
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-025-02400-x
Figure: Equilibrium director configurations for skyrmions and bimerons. © Teixeira et al., Communications Physics (2026)
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