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Abstract |
This talk gives a brief introduction to liquid crystals as intermediate materials between the conventional solid and liquid phases of matter. We discuss the key physical properties of nematic liquid crystals that render them unique and invaluable for a range of applications, notably they form the backbone of the multi-billion dollar liquid crystal display industry. We focus on a specific example of a liquid crystal display: the planar bistable nematic device first reported in a paper by Tsakonas et.al in 2007. We model the device in three different continuum frameworks: a simple Oseen-Frank framework, a two-dimensional Landau-de Gennes framework and a fully three-dimensional Landau-de Gennes framework. In each case, we discuss the corresponding energy minimizers and their correspondence with the experimentally observable equilibria. Whilst exploring the energy landscape, we numerically compute transition states which connect stable equilibria. In the three-dimensional Landau-de Gennes framework, we numerically discover a new stable equilibrium labelled as the Well Order Reconstruction Solution, previously unreported in the literature. These examples illustrate how relatively standard analytical tools or reduced models can yield qualitative and quantitative information about real-life devices and applications. |
