Incompressibility conditions in liquid crystals (Q699709)

The authors discuss the implications of incompressibility approximation on relevant transport parameters like viscosities, flow alignment coefficients and rotational viscosities in uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals. They compare the hydrodynamic theory and Leslie-Ericksen approach. By re-defining the pressure in the latter description, an agreement is found between these theories. For systems with positional order, like smectic and columnar liquid crystals the authors show that, generally, the incompressibility does not imply that the displacement field is source-free.