Date
Thu, 26 Nov 2015
Time
12:00 - 13:00
Location
L6
Speaker
Giacomo Canevari
Organisation
University of Oxford
Nematic liquid crystals are composed by rod-shaped molecules with long-range orientation order. These materials admit topological defect lines, some of which are associated with non-orientable configurations. In this talk, we consider the Landau-de Gennes variational theory of nematics. We study the asymptotic behaviour of minimizers as the elastic constant tends to zero. We assume that the energy of minimizers is of the same order as the logarithm of the elastic constant. This happens, for instance, if the boundary datum has finitely many singular points. We prove convergence to a locally harmonic map with singularities of dimension one (non-orientable line defects) and, possibly, zero (point defects).
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