A MINIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR A RELAXED ENERGY CONNECTED WITH THE THEORY OF LIQUID CRYSTALS

Abstract

Bethuel, Brezis and Coron have recently proposed a modified energy (the so-called relaxed energy) in order to address the gap phenomenon discovered by Hardt and Lin. In this paper, our goal is to investigate from the numerical point of view the behavior of this energy for which the question of regularity is open. Results presented supports the conjecture that minimizers are indeed regular.