Thermal fluctuations and anomalous elasticity of homogeneous nematic elastomers
Soft Condensed Matter
2009-11-07 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Materials Science
Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
We present a unified formulation of a rotationally invariant nonlinear elasticity for a variety of spontaneously anisotropic phases, and use it to study thermal fluctuations in nematic elastomers and spontaneously anisotropic gels. We find that in a thermodynamic limit homogeneous nematic elastomers are universally incompressible, are characterized by a universal ratio of shear moduli, and exhibit an anomalous elasticity controlled by a nontrivial low temperature fixed point perturbative in D=3-epsilon dimensions. In three dimensions, we make predictions that are asymptotically exact.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0212206,
title = {Thermal fluctuations and anomalous elasticity of homogeneous nematic elastomers},
author = {Xiangjun Xing and Leo Radzihovsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0212206},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 RevTeX pgs,,submitted to Europhysics Letters