Lipschitz Optimal Transport Metric for a Wave System Modeling Nematic Liquid Crystals

SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 5144-5174, August 2024.
Abstract. In this paper, we study the Lipschitz continuous dependence of conservative Hölder continuous weak solutions to a variational wave system derived from a model for nematic liquid crystals. Since the solution of this system generally forms a finite time cusp singularity, the solution flow is not Lipschitz continuous under the Sobolev metric used in the existence and uniqueness theory. We establish a Finsler type optimal transport metric, and show the Lipschitz continuous dependence of the solution on the initial data under this metric. This kind of Finsler type optimal transport metrics was first established in [A. Bressan and G. Chen, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., 226 (2017), pp. 1303-1343] for the scalar variational wave equation. This equation can be used to describe the unit direction [math] of mean orientation of nematic liquid crystals, when [math] is restricted on a circle. The model considered in this paper describes the propagation of [math] without this restriction, i.e. [math], takes any value on the unit sphere. So we need to consider a wave system instead of a scalar equation.