We prove that the zero set of a minimizer of the modified Ericksen energy for nematic liquid crystals with variable degree of orientation consists locally of isolated points and a finite union of H\"older continuous curves with only finitely many crossings.Comment: 32 pages; minor revisions; typographical errors corrected; new references adde

In [2] Hardt, Lin and the author proved that the defect set of minimizers of the modified Ericksen energy for nematic liquid crystals consists locally of a finite union of isolated points and Hölder continuous curves with finitely many crossings. In this article, we show that each Hölder continuous curve in the defect set is of finite length. Hence, locally the defect set is rectifiable. For the most part, the proof follows the work of De Lellis, Marchese, Spadaro and Valtorta [11] on harmonic Q-valued maps closely. The blow-up analysis in [2] allows us to simplify the covering arguments in [11] and locally estimate the length of line defects in a geometric fashion.2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 58E15, 58E20, 49Q20, 76A15.

We study the singular set of free interface in an optimal partition problem for the Dirichlet eigenvalues. We prove that its upper (n − 2)‐dimensional Minkowski content, and consequently its (n − 2)‐dimensional Hausdorff measure, are locally finite. We also show that the singular set is countably (n − 2)‐rectifiable; namely, it can be covered by countably many C1‐manifolds of dimension (n − 2), up to a set of (n − 2)‐dimensional Hausdorff measure zero. Our results hold for optimal partitions on Riemannian manifolds and harmonic maps into homogeneous trees as well. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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We prove the uniqueness of homogeneous blow-up limits of maps minimizing the modified Ericksen energy for nematic liquid crystals in a planar domain. The proof is based on the Weiss monotonicity formula, and a blow-up argument, originally due to Allard and Almgren [1] for minimal surfaces, and L. Simon [18] for energy-minimizing maps into analytic targets, which exploits the integrability of certain Jacobi fields.X(s, n) = s 2 W (n) + κ 5 |∇s| 2 + κ 6 |∇s · n| 2 + ψ(s), 1