Local elastic stability for nematic liquid crystals.
We derive a stability criterion for nematic liquid crystals from a general study of the second variation of Frank's elastic free-energy functional. When applied to elementary director alignments compatible with the boundary conditions, such as the uniform alignment in a hybrid cell, this criterion is able to determine whether the most likely destabilizing mode is periodic or not, and to estimate the modulation length of such a mode, when it is periodic.
Rosso
Riccardo
R
Dipartimento di Matematica, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica della Materia, Università di Pavia, via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia, Italy.
Virga
Epifanio G
EG
Kralj
Samo
S