Splay ostracism on ferroelectric nematic shells
Abstract
Ostracism was the practice in use in Athens and other ancient Greek cities to send into exile citizens whose influence was deemed to be dangerous. Quite similarly, splay ostracism is here the approximation that bans splay distortion from thin films of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals on a curved shell in space. This reduces to a mere geometric problem the quest for equilibria of director vortexes and the walls isolating them, as splay ostracism requires the director field lines to be everywhere orthogonal to systems of geodesics on the shell. Consequences of this theorem are explored for shells with Gaussian curvature of either sign. The resulting quasi static dynamics reveals both cases where walls escape from the shell and cases where they are trapped on it, with possibly different reflections on the vortex dynamics.
Related
- Von Kármán theories for thin elastic shells subject to pressure
- Global existence of solutions to the 2D compressible nematic liquid crystal flows with large initial data and vacuum
- Pólya's conjecture for Neumann eigenvalues of spherical shells
- On the minimality of the radial singularity in nematic liquid crystals
- Global Well-Posedness of Strong Solutions to the Two-Dimensional Compressible Nematic Liquid Crystal Flows with Large Initial Data and Vacuum
BibTeX
@misc{virga2026splay,
title = {{Splay ostracism on ferroelectric nematic shells}},
author = {Epifanio G. Virga},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.08027},
eprint = {2611.08027},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08027},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Splay ostracism on ferroelectric nematic shells
AU - Epifanio G. Virga
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.08027
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08027
AB - Ostracism was the practice in use in Athens and other ancient Greek cities to send into exile citizens whose influence was deemed to be dangerous. Quite similarly, splay ostracism is here the approximation that bans splay distortion from thin films of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals on a curved shell in space. This reduces to a mere geometric problem the quest for equilibria of director vortexes and the walls isolating them, as splay ostracism requires the director field lines to be everywhere orthogonal to systems of geodesics on the shell. Consequences of this theorem are explored for shells with Gaussian curvature of either sign. The resulting quasi static dynamics reveals both cases where walls escape from the shell and cases where they are trapped on it, with possibly different reflections on the vortex dynamics.
ER -