Abstract
Here we make several observations on a variety of special classes of harmonic maps from domains in IR3 to S 2. Such maps are relevant for the study of liquid crystals; see e.g. [HK1], [HKL1], [HKLu]. Part of our work is motivated by questions about the nonuniqueness and the number of harmonic maps having fixed boundary data. Here we show that the number may actually be infinite. For example, by Corollary 3.2 below there exists a one parameter family of distinct energy-minimizers each having the same Dirichlet boundary data.
Research partially supported by the National Science Foundation and the AFOSR through grant DMS-871881.
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Hardt, R., Kinderlehrer, D., Lin, F.H. (1990). The Variety of Configurations of Static Liquid Crystals. In: Berestycki, H., Coron, JM., Ekeland, I. (eds) Variational Methods. Progress in Nonlinear Differential Equations and Their Applications, vol 4. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1080-9_9
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