Universal mean-field phase diagram for biaxial nematics obtained from a minimax principle.

We study a class of quadratic Hamiltonians which describe both fully attractive and partly repulsive molecular interactions, characteristic of biaxial liquid crystal molecules. To treat the partly repulsive interactions we establish a minimax principle for the associated mean-field free energy. We show that the phase diagram described by Sonnet [Phys.

Modeling optical properties of liquid-crystal devices by numerical solution of time-harmonic Maxwell equations.

We consider numerical modeling of the optical properties of devices typical of beam-steering devices based on liquid-crystal materials: two-dimensional, anisotropic and inhomogeneous dielectric properties, periodic in one dimension. A mathematical formulation of the system of second-order partial differential equations for the components of the time-harmonic electric field is discretized by using a finite-element method based on curl-conforming edge elements. The discrete equations are also interpreted as equivalent finite-difference equations.

Order reconstruction in frustrated nematic twist cells.

Within the Landau-de Gennes theory of liquid crystals, we study the equilibrium configurations of a nematic cell with twist boundary conditions. Under the assumption that the order tensor Q be uniaxial on both bounding plates, we find three separate classes of solutions, one of which contains the absolute energy minimizer, a twistlike solution that exists for all values of the distance d between the plates. The solutions in the remaining two classes exist only if d exceeds a critical value d(c).