Solution landscapes of nematic liquid crystals confined on a hexagon

Yucen Han, Jianyuan Yin, Pingwen Zhang, Apala Majumdar, Lei Zhang

Published 2020-03-17Version 1

We study reduced nematic equilibria on regular two-dimensional polygons with Dirichlet tangent boundary conditions, in a reduced two-dimensional framework, discussing their relevance in the full three-dimensional framework too. We work at a fixed temperature and study the reduced stable equilibria in terms of the edge length, $\lambda$ of the regular polygon, $E_K$ with $K$ edges. We analytically compute a novel "ring solution" in the $\lambda \to 0$ limit, with a unique point defect at the centre of the polygon for $K \neq 4$. The ring solution is unique. For sufficiently large $\lambda$, we deduce the existence of at least $\left[K/2 \right]$ classes of stable equilibria and numerically compute bifurcation diagrams for reduced equilibria on a pentagon and hexagon, as a function of $\lambda^2$, thus illustrating the effects of geometry on the structure, locations and dimensionality of defects in this framework.