Anomalous Elasticity of Polymer Cholesterics

Abstract

We show that polymer cholesterics have much longer pitches than comparable short molecule cholesterics, due to their anomalous elasticity. The pitch $P$ of a chiral mixture with concentration $c$ near the racemic (non-chiral) concentration $c^{\ast }$ diverges like $|c-c^{\ast }{|}^{-\nu }$ with $\nu =1.43\pm 0.04$ (for short molecule cholesterics $\nu =1$). The short molecule law is recovered for polymers of finite molecular length $\ell$ once the pitch is longer than a length that diverges like ${\ell }^{\gamma }$ with $\gamma =0.67\pm 0.01$. Our predictions could be tested by measurements of the pitch in DNA.

12 pages, Plain TeX, (1 postscript figure, compressed, uuencoded and appended to paper), minor corrections, IASSNS-HEP-94/48

References in corpus (3)

• Theory of Directed Polymers
• Rigid Chiral Membranes
• Twisted Line Liquids

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Equation of state for polymer liquid crystals: theory and experiment
• Defects in Chiral Columnar Phases: Tilt Grain Boundaries and Iterated Moire Maps
• Tensorial conservation law for nematic polymers