Abstract :
Liquid crystal is a state of matter intermediate between isotropic liquid and anisotropic crystal. The mechanical and optical properties of liquid crystals are highly nonlinear. Consequently, they are naturally soliton-bearing media. After a brief general introduction, five topics in recent developments on solitons in liquid crystals are presented, namely (i) optical solitons, (ii) solitons in nematics under a rotating magnetic field, (iii) solitons in electroconvective nematics, (iv) incommensurate solitons in smectic A, and (v) the soliton model for the chevron structure in ferroelectric smectic C* and in smectic A.
