ORIENTATION SYMMETRY BREAKINGS IN SHEARING LIQUID-CRYSTALS

It has long been an unexplained phenomenon that both out-of-shear-plane [P. Pieranski and E. Guyon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 32, 924 (1974)] and partially in-shear-plane orientation modes [P. E. Cladis and S. Torza, Phys. Rev. Lett. 35, 1283 (1975)] of nonaligning nematic liquid crystals between bounding shearing surfaces are experimentally observed. To explain these seemingly mutually exclusive orientation modes, we show that the numerical solutions to the well established Leslie-Ericksen governing equations predict multiple stable steady state orientation patterns, which display the main characteristics of the two experimentally observed orientation modes.