- Series
- CDSNS Colloquium
- Time
- Monday, March 14, 2011 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005
- Speaker
- Weishi Liu – University of Kansas – wliu@math.ku.edu – http://www.math.ku.edu/~wliu/
- Organizer
- Shui-Nee Chow
They may flow like fluids but under constraints of mechanical energies from their crystal aspects. As a result, they exhibit very rich phenomena that grant them tremendous applications in modern technology. Based on works of Oseen, Z\"ocher, Frank and others, a continuum theory (not most general but satisfactory to a great extent) for liquid-crystals was formulated by Ericksen and Leslie in 1960s. We will first give a brief introduction to this classical theory and then focus on various important special settings in both static and dynamic cases. These special flows are rather simple for classical fluids but are quite nonlinear for liquid-crystals. We are able to apply abstract theory of nonlinear dynamical systems upon revealing specific structures of the problems at hands.