Physics – Condensed Matter
Scientific paper
1995-11-05
Physical Review E 53 (1996) 2444-2453
Physics
Condensed Matter
12 pages, REVTEX, 1 figure using epsf
Scientific paper
10.1103/PhysRevE.53.2444
Liquid crystal elastomers present a rich combination of effects associated with orientational symmetry breaking and the underlying rubber elasticity. In this work we focus on the effect of the network on the nematic--smectic-{\sl A} transition, exploring the additional translational symmetry breaking in these elastomers. We incorporate the crosslinks as a random field in a microscopic picture, thus expressing the degree to which the smectic order is locally frozen with respect to the network. We predict a modification of the NA transition, notably that it can be treated at the mean-field level (type-I system), due to the coupling with elastic degrees of freedom. There is a shift in the transition temperature $T_{\scriptscriptstyle NA}$, a suppression of the Halperin-Lubensky-Ma (HLM) effect (thus recovering the mean-field continuous transition to the smectic state), and a new tri-critical point, depending on the conditions of network formation. When the nematic phase possesses `soft elasticity', the NA transition becomes of first order due to the coupling with soft phonons in the network. We also discuss the microscopic origin of phenomenological long-wavelength coupling between smectic phase and elastic strain.
Olmsted Peter D.
Terentjev Eugene M.
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