Geometry of nematic liquid crystals under shearing flow

In this work, an extended version of the Hess-Baalss conformal approach is used to propose a relation connecting the viscosity coefficients of the nematic liquid crystals. Starting from the well-known fact that, in its usual form, the conformal transformation leads to results which are not observed experimentally, it is shown that, when the director field of an ordered nematic phase under sheared motion is taken as a three-dimensional surface with torsion, the resulting theory describes the observed experimental data efficiently. Moreover, this model predicts that the five viscosity coefficients of the Leslie ah hoc model are not independent, but connected. A comparison of the deduced relationship with experimental data is performed and an excellent agreement is obtained.