Related papers: Orientability and energy minimization in liquid cr…
We propose Landau phenomenology for describing the phase transition from the conventional nematic into the conical helical orientationally non-uniform structure recently identified in liquid crystals formed by "banana"-shaped molecules. The…
The study of hydrodynamics of liquid crystal leads to many fasci- nating mathematical problems, which has prompted various interesting works recently. This article reviews the static Oseen-Frank theory and surveys some recent progress on…
In this paper we discuss the behavior of the Oseen-Frank model for nematic liquid crystals in the limit of vanishing thickness. More precisely, in a thin slab~$\Omega\times (0,h)$ with~$\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^2$ and $h>0$ we consider the…
We develop a Landau theory for bend flexoelectricity in liquid crystals of bent-core molecules. In the nematic phase of the model, the bend flexoelectric coefficient increases as we reduce the temperature toward the nematic to polar phase…
For the Landau-de Gennes functional modeling nematic liquid crystals in dimension three, we prove that, if the energy is bounded by $C(\log\frac{1}{\varepsilon}+1)$, then the sequence of minimizers…
In nematic liquid crystals (NLCs), topological defects of a chiral origin play a role in phase transitions and lead to phase configurations of nontrivial topology, like those in neutron stars and helium in the A-phase. In the…
Liquid crystal droplets are of great interest from physics and applications. Rigorous mathematical analysis is challenging as the problem involves harmonic maps (and in general the Oseen-Frank model), free interfaces and topological defects…
This article re-examines a classic question in liquid-crystal physics: What are the elastic modes of a nematic liquid crystal? The analysis uses a recent mathematical construction, which breaks the director gradient tensor into four…
Liquid crystal networks combine the orientational order of liquid crystals with the elastic properties of polymer networks, leading to a vast application potential in the field of responsive coatings, e.g., for haptic feedback,…
We study a class of Landau-de Gennes energy functionals in the asymptotic regime of small elastic constant $L>0$. We revisit and sharpen the results in [18] on the convergence to the limit Oseen-Frank functional. We examine how the…
The behavior of a thin film of nematic liquid crystal with unequal Frank constants is discussed. Distinct Frank constants are found to imply unequal core energies for $+1/2$ and $-1/2$ disclinations. Even so, a topological constraint is…
We present explicit expressions of the helicity conservation in nematic liquid crystal flows, for both the Ericksen-Leslie and Landau-de Gennes theories. This is done by using a minimal coupling argument that leads to an Euler-like equation…
The classical theory of liquid crystal elasticity as formulated by Oseen and Frank describes the (orientable) optic axis of these soft materials by a director $\mathbf{n}$. The ground state is attained when $\mathbf{n}$ is uniform in space;…
Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the…
In this work, we study the nematic-isotropic phase transition based on the dynamics of the Landau--De Gennes theory of liquid crystals. At the critical temperature, the Landau--De Gennes bulk potential favors the isotropic phase and nematic…
We use the method of $\Gamma$-convergence to study the behavior of the Landau-de Gennes model for a nematic liquid crystalline film attached to a general fixed surface in the limit of vanishing thickness. This paper generalizes the approach…
We consider a variational two-dimensional Landau-de Gennes model in the theory of nematic liquid crystals in a disk of radius $R$. We prove that under a symmetric boundary condition carrying a topological defect of degree $\frac{k}{2}$ for…
In uniaxial soft matter with a reorientational nonlinearity, such as nematic liquid crystals, a light beam in the extraordinary polarization walks off its wavevector due to birefringence, while it undergoes self-focusing via an increase in…
Some recent analytical papers have explored limiting behaviors of Landau-deGennes models for liquid crystals in certain extreme ranges of the model parameters: limits of "vanishing elasticity" (in the language of some of these papers) and…
We study global minimizers of a continuum Landau-De Gennes energy functional for nematic liquid crystals, in three-dimensional domains. Assuming smooth and uniaxial (e.g. homeotropic) boundary conditions and a corresponding physically…