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Elastic energy of liquid crystals in convex polyhedra
2004
Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General
We consider nematic liquid crystals in a bounded, convex polyhedron described by a director field n(r) subject to tangent boundary conditions. We derive lower bounds for the one-constant elastic energy in terms of topological invariants. For a right rectangular prism and a large class of topologies, we derive upper bounds by introducing test configurations constructed from local conformal solutions of the Euler-Lagrange equation. The ratio of the upper and lower bounds depends only on the
doi:10.1088/0305-4470/37/44/l05
fatcat:3nqnkjcsojefrdnopo4kjazpgy