Dewetting of thin nematic films in the presence of spatially-varying substrate anchoring*

Partially wetting nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films on substrates are unstable to dewetting-type instabilities due to destabilizing solid/NLC interaction forces. These instabilities are modified by the nematic nature of the films, which influences the effective solid/NLC interaction.  In the present contribution, we focus on the influence of imposed substrate anchoring on the instability development. The analysis is carried out within a long-wave formulation based on the Leslie–Ericksen description of NLC films. Linear stability analysis of the resulting equations shows that some features of the instability, such as emerging wavelengths, may not be influenced by the imposed substrate anchoring. Going further into the nonlinear regime, considered via large-scale GPU-based simulations, shows however that nonlinear effects may play an important role, in particular in the case of strong substrate anchoring anisotropy.