Elastic energies for nematic elastomers.
We discuss several elastic energies for nematic elastomers and their small strain expansions both in the regime of large director rotations, and in the case that director changes are small. We propose two fully non-linear model anisotropic energies and compare the behavior they predict with the currently available experimental evidence.
DeSimone
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SISSA-International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy. desimone@sissa.it
Teresi
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