Liquid Crystals on Deformable Surfaces

Abstract: Liquid crystals with molecules constrained to the tangent bundle of a curved surface show interesting phenomena resulting from the tight coupling of the elastic and bulk free energies of the liquid crystal with geometric properties of the surface. We derive thermodynamically consistent Frank-Oseen-Helfrich and Landau-de Gennes-Helfrich models which consider the simultaneous relaxation of the director/Q-tensor fields and the surface. The resulting systems of vector- or tensor-valued surface partial differential equation and geometric evolution laws are numerically solved to tackle the rich dynamics of these systems and to compute the resulting equilibrium shapes. The results strongly depend on the intrinsic and extrinsic curvature contributions and can lead to unexpected asymmetric shapes.