Long time behavior and field-induced instabilities of smectic liquid crystals

In this paper, we study long time behavior and dynamical instabilities of smectic liquid crystals in an applied magnetic field. Under a planar ansatz of the de Gennes model, we first establish existence of global weak solutions and prove convergence to an equilibrium as t tends to infinity. Then we discuss field-induced dynamical instability of pure smectic states and dynamical instability of the pure nematic states, which rely on weak instabilities of the pure smectic and nematic states in magnetic fields. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.