Theory of monolayers with boundaries: Exact results and Perturbative analysis

Abstract

Domains and bubbles in tilted phases of Langmuir monolayers contain a class of textures knows as boojums. The boundaries of such domains and bubbles may display either cusp-like features or indentations. We derive analytic expressions for the textures within domains and surrounding bubbles, and for the shapes of the boundaries of these regions. The derivation is perturbative in the deviation of the bounding curve from a circle. This method is not expected to be accurate when the boundary suffers large distortions, but it does provide important clues with regard to the influence of various energetic terms on the order-parameter texture and the shape of the domain or bubble bounding curve. We also look into the effects of thermal fluctuations, which include a sample-size-dependent effective line tension.

replaced with published version, 21 pages, 16 figures included

References in corpus (3)

• Boojums and the Shapes of Domains in Monolayer Films
• Stability of Texture and Shape of Circular Domains of Langmuir Monolayers
• Textures and the shapes of domains in Langmuir monolayers

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Texture and shape of two-dimensional domains of nematic liquid crystal
• Superstatistics in random matrix theory
• Numerical studies of domains and bubbles of Langmuir monolayers
• Bubble Nucleation of Spatial Vector Fields
• Topics in vacuum decay (Ph.D Thesis)