Raghav Venkatraman (Carnegie Mellon University)

Title: Defects and Phase Transitions in highly anisotropic liquid crystals

Abstract:

We introduce and study the asymptotics of a Continuum model in two dimensions to describe interfacial singularities along the nematic/ isotropic phase boundaries. After setting the stage with some results in the spirit of Gamma convergence, we will describe several examples to illustrate varied phenomena that emerge in singular perturbation problems that have a large disparity in the penalization of different derivative terms. This is joint work with Peter Sternberg, Dmitry Golovaty and Mike Novack.