Richard F. Barry Jr. Seminar: Yuning Liu, NYU Shanghai - "Oseen-Frank model as a singular limit of Onsager's molecular model"
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- Date/Time
- 05/17/2016 12:30 PM EST - 1:30 PM EST
- Location
- Engineering & Computational Sciences Building - 2120
- Fee
- Free
- Description
- ABSTRACT: We study the relationship between Onsager's molecular theory and the Oseen-Frank theory for nematic liquid crystals. Under the molecular setting, we consider the free energy that includes the effects of nonlocal molecular interactions and prove the existence of global minimizers, under strong anchoring boundary condition. Moreover, when the re-scaled interaction distance tends to zero, we show that, the corresponding global minimizers will converge to an uniaxial distribution whose orientation is predicted by the Oseen-Frank energy.