Related papers: Liquid crystals and harmonic maps in polyhedral do…
We consider finite energy and $L^2$ differential forms associated with strongly local regular Dirichlet forms on compact connected topologically one-dimensional spaces. We introduce notions of local exactness and local harmonicity and prove…
We consider dipolar interactions between heteronuclear molecules in low-dimensional geometries. The setup consists of two one-dimensional tubes. We study the stability of possible few-body complexes in the regime of repulsive intratube…
We consider the pretilt alignment of nematic liquid crystal (LC) on inhomogeneous surface patterns comprising patches of homeotropic or homogeneous alignment domains, with azimuthal anisotropy assumed in the surface plane. We found that the…
Positive definiteness of a Hamiltonian expanded about an equilibrium point provides only a necessary condition for stability, a criterion known as Dirichlet's theorem. The reason that this criterion is not necessary for stability is because…
The existence and the regularity results obtained in [37] for the variational model introduced in [36] to study the optimal shape of crystalline materials in the setting of stress-driven rearrangement instabilities (SDRI) are extended from…
We study the global Lipschitz character of minimisers of the Dirichlet energy of diffeomorphisms between doubly connected domains with smooth boundaries from Riemann surfaces. The key point of the proof is the fact that minimisers are…
The calculation of the discrete atomistic energy of a crystal near the continuum limit encounters difficulties caused by the geometric discrepancy between the continuum region occupied by the body, and the discrete collection of lattice…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
In this note, we show that the solution to the Dirichlet problem for the minimal surface system in any codimension is unique in the space of distance-decreasing maps. This follows as a corollary of the following stability theorem: if a…
We study tensor-valued minimizers of the Landau-de Gennes energy functional on a simply-connected planar domain $\Omega$ with non-contractible boundary data. Here the tensorial field represents the second moment of a local orientational…
The present paper introduces the concept of monotone Hopf-harmonics in $2D$ as an alternative to harmonic homeomorphisms. It opens a new area of study in Geometric Function Theory (GFT). Much of the foregoing is motivated by the principle…
We identify the Variational Principle governing inifinity-Harmonic maps, that is solutions to the Infinity-Laplacian. The system was first derived in the limit of the p-Laplacian as p->inifinity in [K2] and is recently studied in [K3]. Here…
We give a sharp lower bound for the energy in homotopy classes of mappings from real projective space to Riemannian manifolds, together with an upper bound for its infimum. We characterize the maps which attain this lower bound for energy,…
Long-range e.g. Coulomb-like interactions for (quantized) topological charges are observed experimentally in liquid crystals, bringing open question this article is exploring: how far can we take this resemblance with particle physics?…
Computer simulations show that liquids of molecules with harmonic intramolecular bonds may have "pseudoisomorphic" lines of approximately invariant dynamics in the thermodynamic phase diagram. We demonstrate that these lines can be…
We investigate two-dimensional crystallization phenomena, i.e. minimality of a lattice's patch for interaction energies, with pair potentials of type $(x,y)\mapsto V(\|x-y\|)$ where $\|\cdot\|$ is an arbitrary norm on $\mathbb{R}^2$ and…
We propose a new approximation for the relaxed energy $E$ of the Dirichlet energy and prove that the minimizers of the approximating functionals converge to a minimizer $u$ of the relaxed energy, and that $u$ is partially regular without…
We investigate minimizers defined on a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^2$ for the Maier--Saupe Q--tensor energy used to characterize nematic liquid crystal configurations. The energy density is singular, as in Ball and Mujamdar's modification…
We carry out an asymptotic analysis of a thin nematic liquid crystal in which one elastic constant dominates over the others, namely \begin{align} \label{energyab} \inf E_\varepsilon(u)\quad\mbox{where}\quad E_\varepsilon(u) :=…
The properties of liquid crystals can be modelled using an order parameter which describes the variability of the local orientation of rod-like molecules. Defects in the director field can arise due to external factors such as applied…