  Widely known for their uses in displays and electro-optics, liquid crystals
are more than just technological marvels. They vividly reveal the topology and
structure of various solitonic and singular field configurations, often
markedly resembling the ones arising in many field theories and in the areas
ranging from particle physics to optics, hard condensed matter and cosmology.
In this review, we focus on chiral nematic liquid crystals to show how these
experimentally highly accessible systems provide valuable insights into the
structure and behavior of fractional, full, and multi-integer two-dimensional
skyrmions, dislocations and both abelian and non-abelian defect lines, as well
as various three-dimensionally localized, often knotted structures that include
hopfions, heliknotons, torons and twistions. We provide comparisons of some of
these field configurations with their topological counterparts in chiral
magnets, discussing close analogies between these two condensed matter systems.
