Nematic textures in spherical shells.

The equilibrium texture of nematic shells is studied as a function of their thickness. For ultrathin shells the ground state has four short 1/2 disclination lines but, as the thickness of the film increases, a three-dimensional escaped configuration composed of two pairs of half-hedgehogs becomes energetically favorable. We derive an exact solution for the nematic ground state in the one Frank constant approximation and study the stability of the corresponding texture against thermal fluctuations.

• Publication year

  2006

• Venue

  Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics

• Publication date

  2006-04-12

• Fields of study

  Materials Science, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevE.74.021711arXiv cond-mat/0604293PMID 17025456
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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