External fields can drive solitons into directed motion, making them promising carriers for information transport. However, controlling soliton motion and interactions remains challenging because many liquid-crystal topological solitons exhibit symmetry-constrained dynamics. Here, we report electrically driven polar solitons in chiral nematic liquid crystals. Flexoelectric torque, dielectric coupling, and chirality generate head–tail polarity and dipole-like behavior, enabling nonreciprocal dynamics and tunable interactions. By varying voltage amplitude, bias, and waveform, solitons exhibit perturbation-sensitive drift, circular, and linear trajectories. Head-to-head alignment causes repulsion, whereas head-to-tail pairing leads to attraction or fusion. Three-dimensional topology analysis further reveals that the polar soliton contains a closed nematic disclination loop with a finite-order Q -tensor core. The loop remains topologically nontrivial, whereas the soliton trajectory is selected dynamically through the field-dependent balance of elastic, dielectric, flexoelectric, and dissipative responses. These results establish a mechanism for programmable motion and interaction of defect-containing solitons in soft anisotropic matter.
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Chen et al. (2026) studied this question.
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