Planar Degenerate Anchoring in Landau-de Gennes Energy

TL;DR

This paper studies the behavior of Landau-de Gennes energy minimizers in nematic liquid crystals, focusing on boundary singularities called boojums and their local structure near the boundary.

Contribution

It characterizes the tangent maps near boojums, showing they are half bubbles with hedgehog structures, extending bubbling analysis to mixed boundary conditions.

Findings

The tangent map near a boojum is a half bubble with a hedgehog or anti-hedgehog structure.

The analysis extends Schoen-Uhlenbeck bubbling techniques to mixed Dirichlet and tangential boundary conditions.

The study reveals the local structure of boundary singularities in nematic liquid crystals under degenerate anchoring.

Abstract

The aim of this article is twofold. First, in the large-body limit and when the temperature is below the nematic-isotropic transition threshold, we verify that the $\mathbb{S}^2$-valued energy-minimizing harmonic map on a bounded smooth domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^3$ with tangential boundary condition is a singular limit of the Landau-de Gennes energy minimizers subject to the Fournier-Galatola planar degenerate anchoring [22]. This harmonic map is referred to as the canonical harmonic map. Our second aim is to address the local structure of the canonical harmonic map near the boundary singularities, which we call boojums. We show that the tangent map of the canonical harmonic map near a boojum is uniquely characterized by a half bubble with a hedgehog or an anti-hedgehog structure, up to a planar rotation. Comparing to the interior counterpart studied by Brezis-Coron-Lieb in [7], for which the full SO(3) group action can be applied to the tangent map near an interior singularity, we can only apply planar rotations to the tangent map near a boojum to maintain the tangential boundary condition. The degeneracy of the group action from SO(3) to SO(2) makes it challenging to investigate the local structure of the boojum singularity. On the other hand, the boundary condition for the half bubble is Dirichlet on the curved boundary and tangential on the flat boundary. We need to extend the Schoen-Uhlenbeck bubbling analysis in [45,46] for energy-minimizing harmonic maps with Dirichlet boundary conditions to our current case with the mixed-type boundary conditions.