Uniaxial versus Biaxial Character of Nematic Equilibria in Three Dimensions

Abstract

We study global minimizers of the Landau-de Gennes (LdG) energy functional for nematic liquid crystals, on arbitrary three-dimensional simply connected geometries with topologically non-trivial and physically relevant Dirichlet boundary conditions. Our results are specific to the low-temperature limit. We prove (i) that (re-scaled) global LdG minimizers converge uniformly to a (minimizing) limiting harmonic map, away from the singular set of the limiting map; (ii) there exist both a point of maximal biaxiality and a nonempty Lebesgue-null set of uniaxial points near each singular point of the limiting harmonic map (this improves the recent results of \cite{contreraslamy}); (iii) estimates for the size of "strongly biaxial" regions in terms of the reduced temperature $t$. We further show that global LdG minimizers in the restricted class of uniaxial $\Qvec$-tensors cannot be stable critical points of the LdG energy for low temperatures.