Topology and Bistability in liquid crystal devices

Abstract

We study nematic liquid crystal configurations in a prototype bistable device - the Post Aligned Bistable Nematic (PABN) cell. Working within the Oseen-Frank continuum model, we describe the liquid crystal configuration by a unit-vector field, in a model version of the PABN cell. Firstly, we identify four distinct topologies in this geometry. We explicitly construct trial configurations with these topologies which are used as initial conditions for a numerical solver, based on the finite-element method. The morphologies and energetics of the corresponding numerical solutions qualitatively agree with experimental observations and suggest a topological mechanism for bistability in the PABN cell geometry.

References in corpus (2)

• Flexoelectric surface switching of bistable nematic devices
• Classification of unit-vector fields in convex polyhedra with tangent boundary conditions

Cited by in corpus (6)

• A Reduced Study for Nematic Equilibria on Two-Dimensional Polygons
• Bulk phase behaviour of binary hard platelet mixtures from density functional theory
• Energies of S^2-valued harmonic maps on polyhedra with tangent boundary conditions
• Modeling and Computation of Liquid Crystals
• Constrained Optimization for Liquid Crystal Equilibria: Extended Results
• Tangent unit-vector fields: nonabelian homotopy invariants and the Dirichlet energy