Defect pairs in nematic cell alignment on doubly connected domains

Abstract

We consider the orientational order that arises from the alignment of anisotropic biological cells confined in bounded domains. Especially, it is known that topological defects, where the orientation angles are not well-defined, play an important role in the global pattern formation of cell alignment. Hence, it is important to investigate the relationship between the shape of the region and the location of the defects. The orientational order of cells is theoretically modelled as a harmonic function achieving the minimum elastic energy state of the nematic liquid crystal, and an analytical formula in simply connected domains is given by Miyazako & Nara (Miyazako, Nara 2022 R. Soc. Open Sci . 9, 211663 ( doi:10.1098/rsos.211663 )). In this paper, we extend this study to construct an analytic formula of cell angle in the doubly connected domains, where topological defects and boundary shapes are represented as the positions of logarithmic singularities and as conformal maps from a given region to a standard annular region, respectively. In addition, using this analytical formula, we propose a numerical algorithm to minimize elastic energy, from which we investigate cell alignment in doubly connected domains with anisotropic quadrilateral boundaries. Our numerical simulations suggest that pairs of topological defects tend to be located around corners of the boundaries, which will be a design principle of the boundary geometry for controlling the defect positions and cell alignment.