defect dynamics

Amit Acharya and Kaushik Dayal

 (To appear in Quarterly of Applied Mathematics)

This paper presents a generalization of traditional continuum approaches to liquid crystals and

liquid crystal elastomers to allow for dynamically evolving line defect distributions. In analogy with

recent mesoscale models of dislocations, we introduce fields that represent defects in orientational

and positional order through the incompatibility of the director and deformation ‘gradient’ fields.