Thin film liquid crystals with oblique anchoring and boojums

DOI10.1016/J.ANIHPC.2020.02.002zbMATH Open1446.76066arXiv1907.04757OpenAlexW3012083748MaRDI QIDQ2188108FDOQ2188108

Authors: Dmitry Golovaty, Stan Alama, Lia Bronsard 

Publication date: 3 June 2020

Published in: Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré. Analyse Non Linéaire (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We study a two-dimensional variational problem which arises as a thin-film limit of the Landau-de Gennes energy of nematic liquid crystals. We impose an oblique angle condition for the nematic director on the boundary, via boundary penalization (weak anchoring.) We show that for strong anchoring strength (relative to the usual Ginzburg-Landau length scale parameter,) defects will occur in the interior, as in the case of strong (Dirichlet) anchoring, but for weaker anchoring strength all defects will occur on the boundary. These defects will each carry a fractional winding number; such boundary defects are known as "boojums". The boojums will occur in ordered pairs along the boundary; for nematic director with angle oblique to the normal vector, they serve to reduce the winding of the phase in two steps, in order to avoid the formation of interior defects. We determine the number and location of the defects via a Renormalized Energy and numerical simulations.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.04757

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zbMATH Keywords

variational problemLandau-de Gennes energyboundary defectboundary penalizationinterior defect

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

PDEs in connection with fluid mechanics (35Q35) Liquid crystals (76A15) Thin fluid films (76A20) Variational methods applied to problems in fluid mechanics (76M30)

Cites Work

• Ginzburg-Landau vortices
• Lower Bounds for Generalized Ginzburg--Landau Functionals
• Landau-De Gennes theory of nematic liquid crystals: the Oseen-Frank limit and beyond
• Boundary vortices in thin magnetic films
• A reduced theory for thin-film micromagnetics
• Analysis of nematic liquid crystals with disclination lines
• Lower bounds for the energy of unit vector fields and applications
• Dimension reduction for the Landau-de Gennes model in planar nematic thin films
• On the asymptotic behavior of minimizers of the Ginzburg-Landau model in 2 dimensions
• On the energy of domain walls in ferromagnetism
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Weak anchoring for a two-dimensional liquid crystal
• Dimension reduction for the Landau-de Gennes model on curved nematic thin films
• Saturn ring defect around a spherical particle immersed in a nematic liquid crystal

Cited In (8)

• Anchoring of twisted chiral nematic liquid crystals on a thin polymeric film
• Global Jacobian and \(\Gamma\)-convergence in a two-dimensional Ginzburg-Landau model for boundary vortices
• Renormalised energy between boundary vortices in thin-film micromagnetics with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction
• Boundary Vortex Formation in Polarization-Modulated Orthogonal Smectic Liquid Crystals
• Spherical particle in nematic liquid crystal with a magnetic field and planar anchoring
• A Variational Method for Generating $n$-Cross Fields Using Higher-Order $Q$-Tensors
• The micromagnetic energy with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in a thin-film regime relevant for boundary vortices
• On minimizers of the 2D Ginzburg-Landau energy with tangential anchoring

Uses Software

• COMSOL

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