Novel Defect Structures in a Strongly Confined Liquid-Crystalline Blue Phase

Abstract

In our numerical study based on a phenomenological description of strongly confined liquid crystalline blue phase I (BP I), we find several novel structures characterized by specific configurations of topological disclination lines. The thickness of the system is of the order of the dimension of the unit cell of the bulk BP I, and the confining surfaces adopts homeotropic anchoring. The structures include an array of double-helix disclination lines accompanied by an orthorhombic lattice of double-twist cylinders, and two parallel arrays of winding disclination lines almost perpendicular to each other.