Geometric frustration and compatibility conditions for two dimensional director fields

Abstract

The uniform director field obtained for the nematic ground state of the hard-rod model of liquid crystals in two dimensions reflects the high symmetry of the constituents of the liquid; It is a manifestation of the constituents' local tendency to avoid splaying and bending with respect to one another. In contrast, bent-core (or banana shaped) liquid-crystal-forming-molecules locally favor a state of zero splay and constant bend. However, such a structure cannot be realized in the plane and the resulting liquid-crystalline phase is frustrated and must exhibit some compromise of these two mutually contradicting local intrinsic tendencies. The generation of geometric frustration from the intrinsic geometry of the constituents of a material is not only natural and ubiquitous but also leads to a striking variety of morphologies of ground states and exotic response properties. In this work we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for two scalar functions, $s$ and $b$ to describe the splay and bend of a director field in the plane. We generalize these compatibility conditions for geometries with non-vanishing constant Gaussian curvature, and provide a reconstruction formula for the director field depending only on the splay and bend fields and their derivatives. Last, we discuss optimal compromises for simple incompatible cases where the locally preferred values of the splay and bend cannot be globally achieved.