English

Uniform profile near the point defect of Landau-de Gennes model

Analysis of PDEs 2022-07-12 v1

Abstract

For the Landau-de Gennes functional on 3D domains, \begin{equation*} I_{\varepsilon}(Q,\Omega):=\int_{\Omega}\left\{\frac{1}{2}|\nabla Q|^2+\frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\left( -\frac{a^2}{2}\mathrm{tr}(Q^2)-\frac{b^2}{3}\mathrm{tr}(Q^3)+\frac{c^2}{4}[\mathrm{tr}(Q^2)]^2 \right) \right\}\,dx, \end{equation*} it is well-known that under suitable boundary conditions, the global minimizer QεQ_\varepsilon converges strongly in H1(Ω)H^1(\Omega) to a uniaxial minimizer Q=s+(nn13Id)Q_*=s_+(n_*\otimes n_*-\frac{1}{3}\mathrm{Id}) up to some subsequence εn\varepsilon_n\rightarrow\infty , where nH1(Ω,S2)n_*\in H^1(\Omega,\mathbb{S}^2) is a minimizing harmonic map. In this paper we further investigate the structure of QεQ_{\varepsilon} near the core of a point defect x0x_0 which is a singular point of the map nn_*. The main strategy is to study the blow-up profile of Qεn(xn+εny)Q_{\varepsilon_n}(x_n+\varepsilon_n y) where {xn}\{x_n\} are carefully chosen and converge to x0x_0. We prove that Qεn(xn+εny)Q_{\varepsilon_n}(x_n+\varepsilon_n y) converges in Cloc2(Rn)C^2_{loc}(\mathbb{R}^n) to a tangent map Q(x)Q(x) which at infinity behaves like a "hedgehog" solution that coincides with the asymptotic profile of nn_* near x0x_0. Moreover, such convergence result implies that the minimizer QεnQ_{\varepsilon_n} can be well approximated by the Oseen-Frank minimizer nn_* outside the O(εn)O(\varepsilon_n) neighborhood of the point defect.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.04525,
  title  = {Uniform profile near the point defect of Landau-de Gennes model},
  author = {Zhiyuan Geng and Arghir Zarnescu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.04525},
  year   = {2022}
}

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26 pages