Woven nematic defects, skyrmions, and the Abelian sandpile model

We show that a fixed set of woven defect lines in a nematic liquid crystal supports a set of nonsingular topological states which can be mapped on t o recurrent stable configurations in the Abelian sandpile model or chip-firing game. The physical correspondence between local skyrmion flux and sandpile height is made between the two models. Using a toy model of the elastic energy, we examine the structure of energy minima as a function of topological class and show that the system admits domain wall skyrmion solitons