Nematic liquid crystals in a polyhedral domain, a prototype for bistable displays, may be described by a unit-vector field subject to tangent boundary conditions. Here we consider the case of a rectangular prism. For configurations with reflection-symmetric topologies, we derive a new lower bound for the one-constant elastic energy. For certain topologies, called conformal and anticonformal, the lower bound agrees with a previous result. For the remaining topologies, called nonconformal, the new bound is an improvement. For nonconformal topologies we derive an upper bound, which differs from the lower bound by a factor depending only on the aspect ratios of the prism.
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