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Unpublished Paper
Bogomol'nyi, Prasad and Sommerfield Configurations in Smectics
Physical Review Letters (2003)
  • Christian Santangelo
  • Randall D. Kamien
Abstract

It is typical in smectic liquid crystals to describe elastic deformations with a linear theory when the elastic strain is small. In smectics, certain essential nonlinearities arise from the requirement of rotational invariance. By employing the Bogomol’nyi, Prasad, and Sommerfield decomposition and relying on boundary conditions and geometric invariants, we have found a large class of exact solutions. We introduce an approximation for the deformation profile far from a spherical inclusion and find an enhanced attractive interaction at long distances due to the nonlinear elasticity, confirmed by numerical minimization.

Disciplines
Publication Date
2003
Comments
Prepublished version downloaded from ArXiv. Published version is located at http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.91.045506
Citation Information
Christian Santangelo and Randall D. Kamien. "Bogomol'nyi, Prasad and Sommerfield Configurations in Smectics" Physical Review Letters (2003)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/christian_santangelo/10/