The universe in a liquid crystalline droplet

There is strong evidence that many natural phenomena could be described using geometrical approaches. Consequently, it is of interest to identify experimentally accessible systems in which universality of geometry-based approaches could be tested or/and investigated in detail. Testbed laboratory systems (i.e., analogs) could serve as gateways toward a deeper understanding of phenomena in other ways hardly or even experimentally inaccessible systems that are mathematically related to such analogs.

Diverse liquid crystalline (LC) phases and configurations are ideal candidates for such purposes. These optically anisotropic soft matter representatives combine properties of ordered crystals and liquids, and exhibit rich diversity of different symmetries. Their states could be well described by mesoscopic molecular fields, which could be easily manipulated by diverse external stimuli, and the resulting field-configurations could be probed using relatively simple and inexpensive optical methods (e.g., optical polarizing microscopy).

In our presentation we intend to illustrate how phenomena studied in LCs could be exploited to get insight into open problems of particle physics and cosmology. In particular, we address (i) the Kibble-Zurek mechanism describing coarsening dynamics of the Higgs field in the early universe, (ii) the stabilization and manipulation of skyrmion-family structures (these quasiparticle configurations were originally proposed to describe hadrons and mesons) and (iii) the stabilization and manipulation of fermionic Weyl-type excitations. We also (iv) illustrate analogs of “virtual particles”, and suggest a possible origin of (v) dark matter and (vi) of the asymmetry between “particles” and “antiparticles” in the Universe.