Neural Network-Based Tensor Model for Nematic Liquid Crystals with Accurate Microscopic Information

Abstract

The phenomenological Landau-de Gennes (LdG) model is a powerful continuum theory to describe the macroscopic state of nematic liquid crystals. However, it is invariably less accurate and less physically informed than the molecular-level models due to the lack of physical meaning of the parameters. We propose a neural network-based tensor (NN-Tensor) model for nematic liquid crystals, supervised by the molecular model. Consequently, the NN-Tensor model not only attains energy precision comparable to the molecular model but also accurately captures the Isotropic-Nematic phase transition, which the LdG model cannot achieve. The NN-Tensor model is further embedded in another neural network to predict liquid crystal configurations in a domain-free and mesh-free manner. We apply the NN-Tensor model to nematic liquid crystals in a number of two-dimensional and three-dimensional domains to demonstrate it can efficiently identify rich liquid crystal configurations in both regular and non-regular confinements.