Phases and Transitions in Phantom Nematic Elastomer Membranes

TL;DR

This paper predicts five distinct phases in nematic elastomer membranes, including a novel nematic-tubule phase with unique symmetry-breaking and soft modes, and analyzes their elastic and orientational properties.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive phase diagram for nematic elastomer membranes, including the novel nematic-tubule phase and its associated soft modes and symmetry-breaking features.

Findings

Five phases identified: isotropic-crumpled, nematic-crumpled, isotropic-flat, nematic-flat, nematic-tubule.

Nematic-tubule exhibits spontaneous symmetry breaking and Goldstone modes.

Long-range nematic order persists despite thermal fluctuations.

Abstract

Motivated by recently discovered unusual properties of bulk nematic elastomers, we study a phase diagram of liquid-crystalline polymerized phantom membranes, focusing on in-plane nematic order. We predict that such membranes should enerically exhibit five phases, distinguished by their conformational and in-plane orientational properties, namely isotropic-crumpled, nematic-crumpled, isotropic-flat, nematic-flat and nematic-tubule phases. In the nematic-tubule phase, the membrane is extended along the direction of {\em spontaneous} nematic order and is crumpled in the other. The associated spontaneous symmetries breaking guarantees that the nematic-tubule is characterized by a conformational-orientational soft (Goldstone) mode and the concomitant vanishing of the in-plane shear modulus. We show that long-range orientational order of the nematic-tubule is maintained even in the presence of harmonic thermal luctuations. However, it is likely that tubule's elastic properties are ualitatively modified by these fluctuations, that can be studied using a nonlinear elastic theory for the nematic tubule phase that we derive at the end of this paper.