Dynamic Theory of Polydomain Liquid-Crystal Elastomers

Abstract

When liquid-crystal elastomers are prepared without any alignment, disordered polydomain structures emerge as the materials are cooled into the nematic phase. These polydomain structures have been attributed to quenched disorder in the cross-linked polymer network. As an alternative explanation, we develop a theory for the dynamics of the isotropic-nematic transition in liquid-crystal elastomers, and show that the dynamics can induce a polydomain structure with a characteristic length scale, through a mechanism analogous to the Cahn-Hilliard equation for phase separation.

References in corpus (5)

• Nematic-Isotropic Transition with Quenched Disorder
• Isotropic-Nematic Transition in Liquid-Crystalline Elastomers: Lattice Model with Quenched Disorder
• Critical fluctuations and random-anisotropy glass transition in nematic elastomers
• Statistical physics of isotropic-genesis nematic elastomers: I. Structure and correlations at high temperatures
• Generalized Deam-Edwards Approach to the Statistical Mechanics of Randomly Crosslinked Systems