Elastic Theory of Defects in Toroidal Crystals

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. We investigate the structural properties of toroidal crystals and we provide a unified description based on the elastic theory of defects in curved geometries.