Uniaxial versus biaxial character of nematic equilibria in three dimensions

Henao, Duvan and Majumdar, Apala and Pisante, Adriano (2017) Uniaxial versus biaxial character of nematic equilibria in three dimensions. Calculus of Variations and Partial Differential Equations, 56. 55. ISSN 1432-0835 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00526-017-1142-8)

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Abstract

We study global minimizers of the Landau–de Gennes (LdG) energy functional for nematic liquid crystals, on arbitrary three-dimensional simply connected geometries with topologically non-trivial and physically relevant Dirichlet boundary conditions. Our results are specific to an asymptotic limit coined in terms of a dimensionless temperature and material-dependent parameter, t and some constraints on the material parameters, and we work in the t→∞ limit that captures features of the widely used Lyuksyutov constraint (Kralj and Virga in J Phys A 34:829–838, 2001). We prove (i) that (re-scaled) global LdG minimizers converge uniformly to a (minimizing) limiting harmonic map, away from the singular set of the limiting map; (ii) we have points of maximal biaxiality and uniaxiality near each singular point of the limiting map; (iii) estimates for the size of “strongly biaxial” regions in terms of the parameter t. We further show that global LdG minimizers in the restricted class of uniaxial Q-tensors cannot be stable critical points of the LdG energy in this limit.

ORCID iDs

Henao, Duvan, Majumdar, Apala ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4802-6720 and Pisante, Adriano;
  • Item type:Article
    ID code:70857
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    30 April 2017
    Published
    4 April 2017
    Published Online
    20 February 2017
    Accepted
    Subjects:Science > Mathematics
    Department:Faculty of Science > Mathematics and Statistics
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:12 Dec 2019 15:59
    Last modified:11 Nov 2024 12:32
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/70857
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