Thermal fluctuations and anomalous elasticity of homogeneous nematic elastomers

Department of Physics, University of Colorado - Boulder, CO 80309, USA

Received: 10 December 2002
Accepted: 15 January 2003

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 dimensions. In three dimensions, we make predictions that are asymptotically exact.