Biaxial escape in nematics at low temperature

Abstract

In the present work, we study minimizers of the Landau-de Gennes free energy in a bounded domain $Ω\subset \mathbb{R}^3$. We prove that at low temperature minimizers do not vanish, even for topologically non-trivial boundary conditions. This is in contrast with a simplified Ginzburg-Landau model for superconductivity studied by Bethuel, Brezis and Hélein. Merging this with an observation of Canevari we obtain, as a corollary, the occurence of biaxial escape: the tensorial order parameter must become strongly biaxial at some point in $Ω$. In particular, while it is known that minimizers cannot be purely uniaxial, we prove the much stronger and physically relevant fact that they lie in a different homotopy class.