The Two Dimensional Liquid Crystal Droplet Problem with Tangential Boundary Condition

This paper studies a shape optimization problem which reduces to a nonlocal free boundary problem involving perimeter. It is motivated by a study of liquid crystal droplets with a tangential anchoring boundary condition and a volume constraint. We establish in 2D the existence of an optimal shape th...

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Authors: Geng, Z.; Lin, F.
Format: Article
Status:Accepted version
Publication date:2022
Country:España
Institution:Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM)
Repository:BIRD. BCAM's Institutional Repository Data
OAI Identifier:oai:bird.bcamath.org:20.500.11824/1421
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11824/1421
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Nonlocal free boundary problem, Liquid crystal droplet, Tangential condition, Weil-Petersson curve
Summary:This paper studies a shape optimization problem which reduces to a nonlocal free boundary problem involving perimeter. It is motivated by a study of liquid crystal droplets with a tangential anchoring boundary condition and a volume constraint. We establish in 2D the existence of an optimal shape that has two cusps on the boundary. We also prove the boundary of the droplet is a chord-arc curve with its normal vector field in the VMO space, and its arc-length parametrization belongs to the Sobolev space $H^{3/2}$. In fact, the boundary curves of such droplets closely resemble the so-called Weil-Petersson class of planar curves. In addition, the asymptotic behavior of the optimal shape when the volume becomes extremely large or small is also studied.

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