  Smectic liquid crystals vividly illustrate the subtle interplay of broken
translational and orientational symmetries, by exhibiting defect structures
forming geometrically perfect confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. Here, we
develop and numerically implement an effective theory to study the dynamics of
focal conic domains in smectic-A liquid crystals. We use the information about
the smectic's structure and energy density provided by our simulations to
develop several novel visualization tools for the focal conics. Our simulations
accurately describe both simple and extensional shear, which we compare to
experiments, and provide additional insight into the coarsening dynamics of
focal conic domains.

Soft Condensed Matter;Statistical Mechanics