On the asymptotic limit for the dynamic isotropic-nematic phase transition with anisotropic elasticity
Abstract
In this paper, we consider the isotropic-nematic phase transition with anisotropic elasticity governed by the Landau-de Gennes dynamics of liquid crystals. For we rigorously justify the limit from the Landau-de Gennes flow to a sharp interface system characterized by a two-phase flow: The interface evolves via motion by mean curvature; In the isotropic region, ; In the nematic region, with and , where the alignment vector field satisfies and with denoting the Oseen-Frank energy; On the interface, the strong anchoring condition is satisfied. This result rigorously verifies a claim made by de Gennes [Mol. Cryst. Liq. Cryst. 1971] regarding the surface tension strength of isotropic-nematic interfaces in dynamical settings. Furthermore, we rigorously justify this limit using the method of matched asymptotic expansions. First, we employ the idea of ``quasi-minimal connecting orbits'' developed by Fei-Lin-Wang-Zhang [Invent.math. 2023] to construct approximated solutions up to arbitrary order. Second, we derive a uniform spectral lower bound for the linearized operator around the approximate solution. To achieve this, we introduce a suitable basis decomposition and a coordinate transformation to reduce the problem to spectral analysis of two scalar one-dimensional linear operators and some singular product estimates. To address the difficulties arising from anisotropic elasticity and the strong anchoring boundary condition, we introduce a div-curl decomposition and, when estimating the cross terms, combine these with the anisotropic elastic terms to close the energy estimates.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.18800,
title = {On the asymptotic limit for the dynamic isotropic-nematic phase transition with anisotropic elasticity},
author = {Huan Dong and Siqi Ren and Wei Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.18800},
year = {2025}
}