We study global minimizers of a continuum Landau-De Gennes energy functional for nematic liquid crystals, in three-dimensional domains, subject to uniaxial boundary conditions. We analyze the physically relevant limit of small elastic constant and show that global minimizers converge strongly, in W 1,2 , to a global minimizer predicted by the Oseen-Frank theory for uniaxial nematic liquid crystals with constant order parameter. Moreover, the convergence is uniform in the interior of the domain, away from the singularities of the limiting Oseen-Frank global minimizer. We obtain results on the rate of convergence of the eigenvalues and the regularity of the eigenvectors of the Landau-De Gennes global minimizer.We also study the interplay between biaxiality and uniaxiality in Landau-De Gennes global energy minimizers and obtain estimates for various related quantities such as the biaxiality parameter and the size of admissible strongly biaxial regions.

We define a continuum energy functional in terms of the meanfield Maier-Saupe free energy, that describes both spatially homogeneous and inhomogeneous systems. The Maier-Saupe theory defines the main macroscopic variable, the Q-tensor order parameter, in terms of the second moment of a probability distribution function. This definition requires the eigenvalues of Q to be bounded both from below and above. We define a thermotropic bulk potential which blows up whenever the eigenvalues tend to these lower and upper bounds. This is in contrast to the Landau-de Gennes theory which has no such penalization. We study the asymptotics of this bulk potential in different regimes and discuss phase transitions predicted by this model.

A planar bistable liquid crystal device, reported in Tsakonas et al. [Appl. Phys. Lett. 90, 111913 (2007)], is modeled within the Landau-de Gennes theory for nematic liquid crystals. This planar device consists of an array of square micrometer-sized wells. We obtain six different classes of equilibrium profiles and these profiles are classified as diagonal or rotated solutions. In the strong anchoring case, we propose a Dirichlet boundary condition that mimics the experimentally imposed tangent boundary conditions. In the weak anchoring case, we present a suitable surface energy and study the multiplicity of solutions as a function of the anchoring strength. We find that diagonal solutions exist for all values of the anchoring strength W ≥ 0, while rotated solutions only exist for W ≥ W_{c}>0, where W_{c} is a critical anchoring strength that has been computed numerically. We propose a dynamic model for the switching mechanisms based on only dielectric effects. For sufficiently strong external electric fields, we numerically demonstrate diagonal-to-rotated and rotated-to-diagonal switching by allowing for variable anchoring strength across the domain boundary.

We study equilibrium liquid crystal configurations in three-dimensional domains, within the continuum Landau-De Gennes theory. We obtain explicit bounds for the equilibrium scalar order parameters in terms of the temperature and material-dependent constants. We explicitly quantify the temperature regimes where the Landau-De Gennes predictions match and the temperature regimes where the Landau-De Gennes predictions don't match the probabilistic second-moment definition of the Q-tensor order parameter. The regime of agreement may be interpreted as the regime of validity of the Landau-De Gennes theory since the Landau-De Gennes theory predicts large values of the equilibrium scalar order parameters -larger than unity, in the low-temperature regime. We discuss a modified Landau-De Gennes energy functional which yields physically realistic values of the equilibrium scalar order parameters in all temperature regimes.

We numerically study structural transitions inside shallow sub-micrometre scale wells with square cross section, filled with nematic liquid crystal material. We model the wells within the Landau-de Gennes theory. We obtain two qualitatively different states: (i) the diagonal state with defects for relatively large wells with lateral dimension greater than a critical threshold and (ii) a new, two-dimensional star-like biaxial order reconstruction pattern called the well order-reconstruction structure (WORS), for wells smaller than the critical threshold. The WORS is defined by an uniaxial cross connecting the four vertices of the square cross section. We numerically compute the critical threshold in terms of the bare biaxial correlation length and study its dependence on the temperature and on the anchoring strength on the lateral well surfaces.