Nonlinear approximation of 3D smectic liquid crystals: sharp lower bound and compactness

Abstract

We consider the 3D smectic energy $$\begin{aligned} {\mathcal {E}}_{\epsilon }\left( u\right) =\frac{1}{2}\int _{\Omega }\frac{1}{\varepsilon } \left( \partial _{z}u-\frac{(\partial _{x}u)^{2}+(\partial _{y}u)^{2}}{2}\right) ^{2} +\varepsilon \left( \partial _{x}^{2}u+\partial _{y}^{2}u\right) ^{2}dx\,dy\,dz. \end{aligned}$$The model contains as a special case the well-known 2D Aviles-Giga model. We prove a sharp lower bound on \({\mathcal {E}}_{\varepsilon }\) as \(\varepsilon \rightarrow 0\) by introducing 3D analogues of the Jin–Kohn entropies Jin and Kohn (J Nonlinear Sci 10:355–390, 2000). The sharp bound corresponds to an equipartition of energy between the bending and compression strains and was previously demonstrated in the physics literature only when the approximate Gaussian curvature of each smectic layer vanishes. Also, for \(\varepsilon _{n}\rightarrow 0\) and an energy-bounded sequence \(\{u_n \}\) with \(\Vert \nabla u_n\Vert _{L^{p}(\Omega )},\, \Vert \nabla u_n\Vert _{L^2(\partial \Omega )}\le C\) for some \(p>6\), we obtain compactness of \(\nabla u_{n}\) in \(L^{2}\) assuming that \(\Delta _{xy}u_{n}\) has constant sign for each n.