| GEOMETRY AND MATERIALS SEMINAR | |
| Topic: | Liquid Crystals, Minimal Surfaces, and Elliptic Functions |
| Speaker: | Randall Kamien |
| Affiliation: | University of Pennsylvania and Member, School of Mathematics |
| Date: | Sunday, January 25 |
| Time/Room: | 3:30pm - 4:30pm/S-101 |
Liquid crystals form layered structures, known as smectics. Modeling these structures as minimal surfaces gives a class of trial solutions from which we can estimate ground state energetics. In order to control the boundary conditions, or topology, we construct surfaces based upon singly- and doubly-periodic functions.