Related papers: Existence and uniqueness of minimizers for axisymm…
We consider a one-dimensional variational problem arising in connection with a model for cholesteric liquid crystals. The principal feature of our study is the assumption that the twist deformation of the nematic director incurs much higher…
We prove existence and uniqueness of minimizers for a family of energy functionals that arises in Elasticity and involves polyconvex integrands over a certain subset of displacement maps. This work extends previous results by Awi and Gangbo…
We study the dynamics of a dimer moving on a periodic one-dimensional substrate as a function of the initial kinetic energy at zero temperature. The aim is to describe, in a simplified picture, the microscopic dynamics of diatomic molecules…
The dynamics of a membrane is a coupled system comprising a moving elastic surface and an incompressible membrane fluid. We will consider a reduced elastic surface model, which involves the evolution equations of the moving surface, the…
We will study an open problem pertaining to the uniqueness of minimizers for a class of variational problems emanating from Meyer's model for the decomposition of an image into a geometric part and a texture part. Mainly, we are interested…
We attempt to describe surface defects in smectic A thin films by formulating a free discontinuity problem - that is, a variational problem in which the order parameter is allowed to have jump discontinuities on some (unknown) set. The free…
Within the Landau-de Gennes theory of liquid crystals, we study theoretically the equilibrium configurations with uniaxial symmetry. We show that the uniaxial symmetry constraint is very restrictive and can in general not be satisfied,…
We study energy minimization of a continuum Landau-de Gennes energy functional for nematic liquid crystals, in three-dimensional axisymmetric domains and in a restricted class of $\mathbb{S}^1$-equivariant (i.e., axially symmetric)…
In a recent paper by Iglesias, Rumpf and Scherzer (Found. Comput. Math. 18(4), 2018) a variational model for deformations matching a pair of shapes given as level set functions was proposed. Its main feature is the presence of anisotropic…
The stability of a thin liquid film bounded by two free surfaces is examined in the presence of insoluble surface active agents. The surface active agents not only cause gradients in surface tension, but could also render surface viscosity…
We propose a continuum model to describe the molecular alignment in thin nematic shells. By contrast with previous accounts, the two-dimensional free energy, aimed at describing the physics of thin films of nematics deposited on curved…
Fluid deformable surfaces show a solid-fluid duality which establishes a tight interplay between tangential flow and surface deformation. We derive the governing equations as a thin film limit and provide a general numerical approach for…
In our previous work,, we studied asymptotic behavior of minimizers of the Landau-de Gennes energy functional on planar domains as the nematic correlation length converges to zero. Here we improve upon those results, in particular by…
The paper develops a continuum theory of weak viscoelastic nematodynamics of Maxwell type. It may describe the molecular elasticity effects in mono-domain flows of liquid crystalline polymers as well as the viscoelastic effects in…
In this article, we consider a simple one-dimensional variational model, describing the delamination of thin films under cooling. We characterize the global minimizers, which correspond to films of three possible types: non delaminated,…
We establish general assumptions under which a constrained vari- ational problem involving the fractional gradient and a local nonlin- earity admits minimizers.
We study a variational problem motivated by models of species population density in a nonhomogeneous environment. We first analyze local minimizers and the structure of the saturated region (where the population attains its maximal density)…
The divergence minimization problem plays an important role in various fields. In this note, we focus on differentiable and strictly convex divergences. For some minimization problems, we show the minimizer conditions and the uniqueness of…
Cavity flow problems in two dimensions, as well as in the axially symmetric three-dimensional case, have been extensively studied in the literature from a qualitative perspective. While numerous results exist concerning minimizers or stable…
We use geometric methods of equivariant dynamical systems to address a long-standing open problem in the theory of nematic liquid crystals, namely a proof of the existence and asymptotic stability of kayaking periodic orbits for which the…