Liquid crystal elastomers and phase transitions in rod networks
Analysis of PDEs
2013-03-26 v1 Soft Condensed Matter
Abstract
In this article, we construct and analyze models of anisotropic crosslinked polymers employing tools from the theory of liquid crystal elastomers. The anisotropy of these systems stems from the presence of rigid-rod molecular units in the network. We study minimization of the energy for incompressible as well as compressible materials, combining methods of isotropic nonlinear elasticity with the theory of lyotropic liquid crystals. We apply our results to the study of phase transitions in networks of rigid rods, in order to model the behavior of actin filament systems found in the cytoskeleton.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1303.6220,
title = {Liquid crystal elastomers and phase transitions in rod networks},
author = {M. Carme Calderer and Carlos A. Garavito and Chong Luo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.6220},
year = {2013}
}