The partial truncated icosahedron phoswich array for detection of low energy charged pions and light charged particles

Zarrella, A.; Churchman, E.; Gauthier, J.; Hagel, K.; Heilborn, L.; Jedele, A.; Lui, Y.-W.; McIntosh, A.B.; Manso, A. Rodriguez; Wakhle, A.; Youngs, M.D.; Yennello, S.J.

doi:10.1016/j.nima.2018.10.161

We studied numerically external stimuli enforced annihilation of a pair of daughter nematic topological defect (TD) assemblies bearing a relatively strong topological charge |m|=3/2. A Landau- de Gennes phenomenological approach in terms of tensor nematic order parameter was used in an effectively two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, where spatial variations along the z-axis were neglected. A pair of {m=3/2,m=−3/2} was enforced by an appropriate surface anchoring field, mimicking an experimental sample realization using the atomic force microscope (AFM) scribing method. Furthermore, defects were confined within a rectangular boundary that imposes strong tangential anchoring. This setup enabled complex and counter-intuitive annihilation processes on varying relevant parameters. We present two qualitatively different annihilation paths, where we either gradually reduced the relative surface anchoring field importance or increased an external in-plane spatially homogeneous electric field E. The creation and depinning of additional defect pairs {12,−12} mediated the annihilation in such a geometry. Furthermore, we illustrate the absorption of TDs by sharp edges of the confining boundary, accompanied by m=±1/4↔∓1/4 winding reversal of edge singularities, and also E-driven zero-dimensional to one-dimensional defect core transformation.

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