Transparent Boundary Condition for Oseen-Frank Model. Application for NLC Cells With Patterned Electrodes

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series Vol. 605; no. 1; pp. 12028 - 12038
• Main Authors: Orquín-Serrano, I, Vijande, J, Villatoro, F R, Ferrando, A, de Córdoba, P Fernández, Michinel, H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 28.04.2015
• Subjects: Boundary conditions; Electric fields; Finite difference time domain method; Iterative methods; Liquid crystals; Nematic crystals; Physics; Solitary waves; Steering; Tensors; Time domain analysis; Waveguides
• ISSN: 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/605/1/012028

In the present work a novel application of Transparent Boundary Conditions (TBC) to nematic liquid crystal cells (NLCC) with planar alignment and a patterned electrode is studied. This device is attracting great interest since it allows soliton steering by optically and externally induced waveguides. We employ the continuum Oseen-Frank theory to find the tilt and twist angle distributions in the cell under the one-constant approximation. The electric field distribution takes into account the whole 2D permittivity tensor for the transverse coordinates. Standard finite difference time domain methods together with an iterative method is applied to find an approximate solution to our coupled problem. A novel class of TBC is used to correctly define the boundary for both the distortion angle problem and the electric field distribution when using patterned electrodes. Thus, we achieve an important decrease of computational needs when solving this kind of problems and we are also capable of exploring weak anchoring conditions for NLCC.