Properties of surface Landau-de Gennes Q-tensor models
Soft Condensed Matter
2019-12-19 v1
Abstract
Uniaxial nematic liquid crystals whose molecular orientation is subjected to a tangential anchoring on a curved surface offer a non trivial interplay between the geometry and the topology of the surface and the orientational degree of freedom. We consider a general thin film limit of a Landau-de Gennes Q-tensor model which retains the characteristics of the 3D model. From this, previously proposed surface models follow as special cases. We compare fundamental properties, such as alignment of the orientational degrees of freedom with principle curvature lines, order parameter symmetry and phase transition type for these models, and suggest experiments to identify proper model assumptions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1912.08685,
title = {Properties of surface Landau-de Gennes Q-tensor models},
author = {Michael Nestler and Ingo Nitschke and Hartmut Löwen and Axel Voigt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.08685},
year = {2019}
}