English

Regularity of a gradient flow generated by the anisotropic Landau-de Gennes energy with a singular potential

Analysis of PDEs 2021-04-05 v3

Abstract

In this paper we study a gradient flow generated by the Landau-de Gennes free energy that describes nematic liquid crystal configurations in the space of QQ-tensors. This free energy density functional is composed of three quadratic terms as the elastic energy density part, and a singular potential in the bulk part that is considered as a natural enforcement of a physical constraint on the eigenvalues of QQ. The system is a non-diagonal parabolic system with a singular potential which trends to infinity logarithmically when the eigenvalues of QQ approaches the physical boundary. We give a rigorous proof that for rather general initial data with possibly infinite free energy, the system has a unique strong solution after any positive time t0t_0. Furthermore, this unique strong solution detaches from the physical boundary after a sufficiently large time T0T_0. We also give estimate of the Hausdorff measure of the set where the solution touches the physical boundary and thus prove a partial regularity result of the solution in the intermediate stage (0,T0)(0,T_0).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.09541,
  title  = {Regularity of a gradient flow generated by the anisotropic Landau-de Gennes energy with a singular potential},
  author = {Yuning Liu and Xinyang Lu and Xiang Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.09541},
  year   = {2021}
}