Close-Tronci paper on liquid crystal dynamics to appear in Proc R Soc London A

downloadThe paper “Equivalent variational approaches to biaxial liquid crystal dynamics” co-authored by Alexander Close and Cesare Tronci has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A.  The arXiv verson of the paper can be downloaded here.  Within the framework of liquid crystal flows, the Qian & Sheng model for Q-tensor dynamics is compared to the Volovik & Kats theory of biaxial nematics by using Hamilton’s variational principle. Under the assumption of rotational dynamics for the Q-tensor, the variational principles underlying the two theories are shown to be equivalent.