We analyze an elastic surface energy which was recently introduced by G. Napoli and L. Vergori to model thin films of nematic liquid crystals. We show how a novel approach in modeling the surface's extrinsic geometry leads to considerable differences with respect to the classical intrinsic energy. Our results concern three connected aspects: (i) using methods of the calculus of variations, we establish a relation between the existence of minimizers and the topology of the surface; (ii) we prove, by a Ginzburg-Landau approximation, the well-posedness of the gradient flow of the energy; (iii) in the case of a parametrized torus we obtain a stronger characterization of global and local minimizers, which we supplement with numerical experiments.

Analysis of a variational model for nematic shells

SEGATTI, ANTONIO GIOVANNI;VENERONI, MARCO
2016-01-01

Abstract

We analyze an elastic surface energy which was recently introduced by G. Napoli and L. Vergori to model thin films of nematic liquid crystals. We show how a novel approach in modeling the surface's extrinsic geometry leads to considerable differences with respect to the classical intrinsic energy. Our results concern three connected aspects: (i) using methods of the calculus of variations, we establish a relation between the existence of minimizers and the topology of the surface; (ii) we prove, by a Ginzburg-Landau approximation, the well-posedness of the gradient flow of the energy; (iii) in the case of a parametrized torus we obtain a stronger characterization of global and local minimizers, which we supplement with numerical experiments.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11571/1163423
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