A Deflation Technique for Detecting Multiple Liquid Crystal Equilibrium States

Understand

Multiple equilibrium states arise in many physical systems, including various types of liquid crystal structures.

• Having the ability to reliably compute such states enables more accurate physical analysis and understanding of experimental behavior.
• This paper adapts and extends a deflation technique for the computation of multiple distinct solutions arising in the context of modeling equilibrium configurations of nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals.
• The deflation method is applied as part of an overall free-energy variational approach and is modified to fit the framework of optimization of a functional with pointwise constraints.