Analysis of a variational model for nematic shells

DOI10.1142/S0218202516500470MaRDI QIDQ2819162zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Antonio Segatti, Marco Veneroni, Michael Snarski

Publication date 28 September 2016

Published in M\(^3\)AS. Mathematical Models \& Methods in Applied Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2795

gradient-flow harmonic maps liquid crystals surface energy topological defects

Semilinear parabolic equations (35K58) PDEs on manifolds (35R01) Inverse problems for integral equations (45Q99) Applications of differential geometry to physics (53Z05) Heat and other parabolic equation methods for PDEs on manifolds (58J35) Applications to the sciences (65Z05)

Abstract: 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 coated by the liquid crystal leads to considerable differences with respect to the classical intrinsic energy. Our results concern three connected aspects: i) using methods of the calculus of variations, we establish a relation between the existence of minimizers and the topology of the surface; ii) we prove, by a Ginzburg-Landau approximation, the well-posedness of the gradient flow of the energy; iii) in the case of a parametrized axisymmetric torus we obtain a stronger characterization of global and local minimizers, which we supplement with numerical experiments.

Recommendations

Cites work

Cited in

(13)

This page was built for publication: Analysis of a variational model for nematic shells

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2819162)