Existence of weak solutions of the surface Beris-Edwards model

Abstract

We prove the existence of weak solutions to the surface Beris-Edwards model for nematic liquid crystals posed on a $d$-dimensional ($d \in \{2,3\}$) closed hypersurface of class $C^{2,1}$. This thermodynamically consistent model, recently introduced by Bouck, Nochetto and Yushutin (2024), couples the incompressible tangent Navier-Stokes equations with a kinematic equation for the Q-tensor field that encodes the orientation of the liquid crystal particles with a general state of orientational order. Extending ideas by Abels, Dolzmann and Liu (2014) and Guillén-González and Rodríguez-Bellido (2015) for the Beris-Edwards model in flat domains, we design a Faedo-Galerkin scheme based upon eigenfunctions of an appropriate tangent Stokes operator and tensor-valued Laplace-Beltrami operator and recover a weak solution via standard compactness arguments.