Speaker:Sean Colbert-Kelly, NIST
Title: A Generalized Ginzburg-Landau model in a Planar Geometry

Abstract: Smectic C* liquid crystal films containing defects give rise to distinctive spiral patterns in the film's texture. A Ginzburg-Landau type model describes this phenomena and the investigation provides a detail analysis of minimal energy configurations for the film's director field. In this talk, I will show that the vector field will contain degree one defects and that it either has a radial configuration or tangential configuration near each defect depending on the relative values of the two dimensional moduli for the film. In addition, I will discuss the characterization of a renormalized energy for the problem and show that it is minimized by the location of these defects.

Time: Friday, May 2, 2014, 11:00am-12:00 p.m. (NOTE SPECIAL TIME)

Place: Exploratory Hall (formerly S & T II), Room 4106

Department of Mathematical Sciences
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MS 3F2
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
http://math.gmu.edu/
Tel. 703-993-1460, Fax. 703-993-1491