Liquid crystals on deformable surfaces

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk-free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the surface. We derive a thermodynamically consistent Landau-de Gennes-Helfrich model which considers the simultaneous relaxation of the Q-tensor field and the surface. The resulting system of tensor-valued surface partial differential equation and geometric evolution laws is numerically solved to tackle the rich dynamics of this system and to compute the resulting equilibrium shape. The results strongly depend on the intrinsic and extrinsic curvature contributions and lead to unexpected asymmetric shapes.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number20200313
JournalProceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Volume476
Issue number2241
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

Keywords

Keywords

  • gradient flow, nematic liquid crystal, shape relaxation