Accepted Paper

Inserted: 10 mar 2023
Last Updated: 13 apr 2023

Journal: Liquid Crystals
Year: 2022
Doi: 10.1080/02678292.2023.2192183

Abstract:

We attempt to describe surface defects in smectic A thin films by formulating a free discontinuity problem - that is, a variational problem in which the order parameter is allowed to have jump discontinuities on some (unknown) set. The free energy functional contains an interfacial energy which penalizes dislocations of the smectic layers at the jump. We discuss mathematical issues related to the existence of minimizers and provide examples of minimizers in some simplified settings.