Thermoconvective instabilities of nematic liquid layers : new theoretical predictions

Abstract

A systematic study of local stability (linear analysis) of nematic liquid layers heated from below or above is presented. New theoretical findings about steady and overstable modes of convection are discussed for the cases of buoyancy-driven convection in the presence or not of a magnetic field parallel to the director. The case of surface tension-driven convection is also presented. This note completes some earlier work by Guyon and collaborators, and Lekkerkerker, and constitutes a unified approach to the rather disparate phenomena that appear in the general Rayleigh-Bénard problem for nematic layers