Title

Toroidal Crystals

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Mark Bowick, Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NYFollow
Luca Giomi, Syracuse University

ORCID

Luca Giomi:

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7740-5960

Document Type

Article

Date

1-23-2008

Keywords

Toroidal Crystals

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

Crystalline assemblages of identical sub-units packed together and elastically bent in the form of a torus have been found in the past ten years in a variety of systems of surprisingly different nature, such as viral capsids, self-assembled monolayers and carbon nanomaterials. In this Letter we analyze the structural properties of toroidal crystals and we provide a unified description based on the elastic theory of defects in curved geometries. We find ground states characterized by the presence of 5-fold disclinations on the exterior of the torus and 7-fold disclinations in the interior. The number of excess disclinations is controlled primarily by the aspect ratio of the torus, suggesting a novel mechanism for creating toroidal templates with precisely controlled valency via functionalization of the defect sites.

Additional Information

4 pages, 4 figures More information at http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3484

Recommended Citation

Bowick, Mark and Giomi, Luca, "Toroidal Crystals" (2008). Physics - All Scholarship. 142.
https://surface.syr.edu/phy/142

Source

Harvested from Arxiv.org

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.