Bogomol’nyi, Prasad, and Sommerfield Configurations in Smectics

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Abstract
It is typical in smectic liquid crystals to describe elastic deformations with a linear theory when the elastic strain is small. In smectics, certain essential nonlinearities arise from the requirement of rotational invariance. By employing the Bogomol’nyi, Prasad, and Sommerfield decomposition and relying on boundary conditions and geometric invariants, we have found a large class of exact solutions. We introduce an approximation for the deformation profile far from a spherical inclusion and find an enhanced attractive interaction at long distances due to the nonlinear elasticity, confirmed by numerical minimization.