Biaxial escape in nematics at low temperature (Q2400348)

The paper treats minimizers of the Landau-de Gennes (LdG) free energy subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions, which minimize the bulk energy density. A striking feature of nenatics is the appearance of particular optical textures (defects). The study of these defects is performed using a tensorial order parameter Q, introduced by de Gennes. Uniaxial states are described by Q-tensors with two equal eigenvalues and biaxial states correspond to Q-tensors with three distinct eigenvalues. Q-tensors may take advantage of the additional degrees of freedom offered by biaxiality, instead of vanishing in the core of the defect. The Q-tensor order parameter may become strongly biaxial (that is, has biaxial escape behavior). After formulating the considered problem and recalling some basic convergence properties of the minimizers of the LdG free energy, the blown-up problem is studied, obtaining a limiting map and deriving its minimal character. It has been shown earlier that a biaxial escape should be energetically favorable when the bulk free energy degenerates to a Ginzburg-Landau-like potential, which occurs for example at low temperatures. The main result of the paper states that a low-temperature isotropic melting is indeed avoided because the minimizing configurations do not vanish even for topologically non-trivial boundary conditions. It is shown as the phenomenon is related to the biaxial escape, namely the only way for the solution of the corresponding variational problem to avoid vanishing is to be strongly biaxial. Thus, the main result settles the question of the essentially non-uniaxial nature of minimizers in the \(T\to 0\) limit. While it is pointed that the uniaxiality constraint is very rigid, the non-existence of purely uniaxial solutions may not be specific to low temperature or energy minimization. The obtained corollary on the occurrence of the biaxial escape is really specific to the low-temperature limit. Finally, it is proved that while minimizers cannot be purely uniaxial, the physically most relevant fact is that they belong to a various homotopy class.