Polydomain structure and its origins in isotropic-genesis nematic elastomers

Abstract

We address the physics of nematic liquid crystalline elastomers randomly crosslinked in the isotropic state. To do this, we construct a phenomenological effective replica Hamiltonian in terms of two order-parameter fields: one for the vulcanization, the other for nematic alignment. Using a Gaussian variational approach, we analyze both thermal and quenched fluctuations of the local nematic order, and find that, even for low temperatures, the macroscopically isotropic polydomain state is stabilized by the network heterogeneity. For sufficiently strong disorder and low enough temperature, our theory predicts unusual, short-range oscillatory structure in (i.e., anti-alignment of) the local nematic order. The present approach, which naturally takes into account the compliant, thermally fluctuating and heterogeneous features of elastomeric networks, can also be applied to other types of randomly crosslinked solids.

7 pages

References in corpus (5)

• Nematic-Isotropic Transition with Quenched Disorder
• Semi-soft Nematic Elastomers and Nematics in Crossed Electric and Magnetic Fields
• Isotropic-Nematic Transition in Liquid-Crystalline Elastomers: Lattice Model with Quenched Disorder
• Critical fluctuations and random-anisotropy glass transition in nematic elastomers
• Nonlinear Elasticity, Fluctuations and Heterogeneity of Nematic Elastomers