A free discontinuity model for smectic thin films
Analysis of PDEs
2023-03-10 v2 Soft Condensed Matter
Abstract
We attempt to describe surface defects in smectic A thin films by formulating a free discontinuity problem - that is, a variational problem in which the order parameter is allowed to have jump discontinuities on some (unknown) set. The free energy functional contains an interfacial energy which penalizes dislocations of the smectic layers at the jump. We discuss mathematical issues related to the existence of minimizers and provide examples of minimizers in some simplified settings.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2211.11051,
title = {A free discontinuity model for smectic thin films},
author = {John M. Ball and Giacomo Canevari and Bianca Stroffolini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.11051},
year = {2023}
}