Bifurcation analysis in a frustrated nematic cell (Q484452)

The author considers a nematic liquid crystal confined between two parallel bounding plates of infinite size and placed at a distance \(2d\). He introduces the Landau-de Gennes reduced free energy \(E_{\lambda }(Q)=\int_{-1}^{1}(\frac{1}{2\lambda ^{2}0}\left| Q^{\prime }\right| ^{2}+f(Q))dx\), where \(\lambda \) is of order \(\frac{d}{\sqrt{L}}\), \(L\) being the elastic constant, \(Q\) is a traceless symmetric matrix and \(f\) is taken as \(f(Q)=\frac{\theta }{6}\left| Q\right| ^{2}-\frac{2}{3}tr(Q^{3})+ \frac{1}{8}\left| Q\right| ^{4}+c(\theta )\), \(c(\theta )\) being taken such that the minimum of \(f\) is equal to 0. \(Q\) will be taken as \[ \left( \begin{matrix} -2q_{1} & 0 & 0 \\ 0 & q_{1}-q_{2} & q_{3} \\ 0 & q_{3} & q_{1}+q_{2} \end{matrix} \right). \] The author quotes from [\textit{A. Majumdar} and \textit{A. Zarnescu}, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 196, No. 1, 227--280 (2010; Zbl 1304.76007)] the existence of minimizers of the above reduced free energy and the Euler-Lagrange associated equation. He then describes the behavior of a minimizer \(Q_{\lambda }\) of \(E_{\lambda }\) with \( q_{3}(0)>0\), when \(\lambda \) goes to \(\infty \). Then he proves the existence of a unique critical point \(\chi _{\lambda }\) of \(E_{\lambda }\) in the subspace \(\mathcal{H}^{ee}=\{Q\in \mathcal{H}:q_{3}=0\}\), where \(\mathcal{H}\) is the affine subspace of \(H^{1}(-1,1)^{3}\) of functions satisfying Dirichlet boundary conditions at \(\pm 1\). He derives smoothness properties of \(\lambda \mapsto \chi _{\lambda }\). The first main result of the paper proves that if \(\theta =-8\) the unique eigenvalue exchange solution \( \chi _{\lambda }\) can be extended uniquely to a smooth map of eigenvalue exchange solutions from \((0,\infty )\) to \(\mathcal{H}^{ee}\). The second main result characterizes the solution of \(DE_{\lambda }(Q)=0\) in a neighborhood of \(\chi _{\lambda _{c}}\) again when \(\theta =-8\). In the last section of his paper, the author considers the case where \(\theta \approx -8\), and he presents quite similar properties of the branch of eigenvalue exchange solutions and of the solutions to \(DE_{\lambda }(Q)=0\).