Uniaxial versus biaxial character of nematic equilibria in three dimensions (Q526961)

This work considers the minimization problem for the Landau-de Gennes energy functional \(I[\mathbf{Q}]=\int_{\Omega} \frac{L}{2}|\nabla \mathbf{Q}|^2+f_B(\mathbf{Q})dV\), where the bulk potential depends on a quartic form of the symmetric traceless \(3\times 3\) matrix representing a macroscopic order parameter. It is shown that its global minimizers on 3D simply connected region converges to a limiting harmonic map in such a way that there are points of maximal biaxiality and unaxiality near each singular point of this map.