Cooling a spherical nematic shell

Abstract

Within the framework of Landau-de Gennes theory for nematic liquid crystals, we study the temperature-induced isotropic-nematic phase transition on a spherical shell. Below a critical temperature, a thin layer of nematic coating a microscopic spherical particle exhibits non-uniform textures due to the geometrical frustration. We find the exact value of critical threshold for the temperature and determine exactly the nematic textures at the transition by means of a weakly nonlinear analysis. The critical temperature is affected by the extrinsic curvature of the sphere, and the nematic alignment is consistent with the Poincar\'e-Hopf index theorem and experimental observations. The stability analysis of the bifurcate textures at the isotropic-nematic transition highlight that only the tetrahedral configuration is stable.