Bifurcation and Stability of Stationary Shear Flows of Ericksen-Leslie Model for Nematic Liquid Crystals

In this work, focusing on a critical case for shear flows of nematic liquid crystals, we investigate multiplicity and stability of stationary solutions via the parabolic Ericksen-Leslie system. We establish a one-to-one correspondence between the set of the stationary solutions with the set of the solutions of an algebraic equation for a cusp case. This one-to-one correspondence is established essentially based on the treatment in the work of (Jiao et al. in J Diff Dyn Syst 34:239-269, 2022) for a different case, and the relation gives directly parameter ranges for existence of multiple stationary solutions; in particular, multiple stationary solutions are created through countably many saddle-node bifurcations for the algebraic equation at critical shear speeds. The main result of the paper is on the stability of stationary solutions associated to the bifurcations; more precisely, (i) for each critical shear speed, there is a unique stationary solution and, for smaller shear speed, the stationary solution disappears but, for larger shear speed, two stationary solutions nearby bifurcate; (ii) more importantly, under a generic condition, there is a simple zero eigenvalue for the linearization of the shear flow at the critical stationary solution and, for larger shear speed, the zero eigenvalue bifurcates to a negative eigenvalue for one of the two stationary solutions and to a positive eigenvalue for the other stationary solution.