Related papers: Minimizing Configurations for Elastic Surface Ener…

We analyze an elastic surface energy which was recently introduced by G. Napoli and L.Vergori to model thin films of nematic liquid crystals. We show how a novel approach that takes into account also the extrinsic properties of the surfaces…

We consider the problem of minimizing the bending or elastic energy among Jordan curves confined in a given open set $\Omega$. We prove existence, regularity and some structural properties of minimizers. In particular, when $\Omega$ is…

We develop an effective bulk model with a topological boundary condition to study the surface states of topological insulators. We find that the Dirac point energy, the band curvature and the spin texture of surface states are crystal…

We study $n$-dimensional area-minimizing currents $T$ in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1},$ with boundary $\partial T$ satisfying two properties: $\partial T$ is locally a finite sum of $(n-1)$-dimensional $C^{1,\alpha}$ orientable submanifolds which only…

We prove a compactness and semicontinuity result that applies to minimisation problems in nonhomogeneous linear elasticity under Dirichlet boundary conditions. This generalises a previous compactness theorem that we proved and employed to…

For a homotopically energy-minimizing map $u: N^3\to S^1$ on a compact, oriented $3$-manifold $N$ with boundary, we establish an identity relating the average Euler characteristic of the level sets $u^{-1}\{\theta\}$ to the scalar curvature…

We provide an approximation result for the pure traction problem of linearized elasticity in terms of local minimizers of finite elasticity, under the constraint of vanishing average curl for admissible deformation maps. When suitable…

At a critical point of a second order phase transition the intrinsic energy surface is flat and there is no stable minimum value of the deformation. However, for a finite system, we show that there is an effective deformation which can…

Constrained Willmore surfaces are conformal immersions of Riemann surfaces that are critical points of the Willmore energy $W=\int H^2$ under compactly supported infinitesimal conformal variations. Examples include all constant mean…

Motivated by a model for lipid bilayer cell membranes, we study the minimization of the Willmore functional in the class of oriented closed surfaces with prescribed total mean curvature, prescribed area, and prescribed genus. Adapting…

We consider a setting in which an evolving surface is implicitly characterized as the zero level of a level set function. Such an implicit surface does not encode any information about the path of a single point on the evolving surface. In…

We show that the elastic energy $E(\gamma)$ of a closed curve $\gamma$ has a minimizer among all plane simple regular closed curves of given enclosed area $A(\gamma)$, and that the minimum is attained for a circle. The proof is of a…

A variational model for describing the morphology of two-phase continua by allowing for the interplay between coherent and incoherent interfaces is introduced. Coherent interfaces are characterized by the microscopical arrangement of atoms…

This paper is concerned with the variational problem for the elastic energy defined on symmetric graphs under the unilateral constraint. Assuming that the obstacle function satisfies the symmetric cone condition, we prove (i) uniqueness of…

We investigate the effect of linear diffusion and interactions with the domain boundary on swarm equilibria by analyzing critical points of the associated energy functional. Through this process we uncover two properties of energy…

For a smooth curve $\gamma$, we define its elastic energy as $E(\gamma)= \frac 12 \int_{\gamma} k^2 (s) ds$ where $k(s)$ is the curvature. The main purpose of the paper is to prove that among all smooth, simply connected, bounded open sets…

The topology and the geometry of a surface play a fundamental role in determining the equilibrium configurations of thin films of liquid crystals. We propose here a theoretical analysis of a recently introduced surface Frank energy, in the…

We consider surfaces with boundary satisfying a sixth order nonlinear elliptic partial differential equation corresponding to extremising the $L^2$-norm of the gradient of the mean curvature. We show that such surfaces with small $L^2$-norm…

We investigate the gradient flow of the $L^2$ norm of the Riemannian curvature on surfaces. We show long time existence with arbitrary initial data, and exponential convergence of the volume normalized flow to a constant scalar curvature…

Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with…