English

Existence of Surface Smectic States of Liquid Crystals

Analysis of PDEs 2016-02-22 v1

Abstract

The Landau-de Gennes model of liquid crystals is a functional acting on wave functions (order parameters) and vector fields (director fields). In a specific asymptotic limit of the physical parameters, we construct critical points such that the wave function (order parameter) is localized near the boundary of the domain, and we determine a sharp localization of the boundary region where the wave function concentrates. Furthermore, we compute the asymptotics of the energy of such critical points along with a boundary energy that may serve in localizing the director field. In physical terms, our results prove the existence of a surface smectic state.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.06241,
  title  = {Existence of Surface Smectic States of Liquid Crystals},
  author = {Só ren Fournais and Ayman Kachmar and Xing-Bin Pan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.06241},
  year   = {2016}
}