Macromolecules, Vol.32, No.14, 4566-4574, 1999
Rheology of liquid crystalline elastomers in their isotropic and smectic A state
The dynamics of two different side-chain liquid crystalline elastomers (SCLCE) exhibiting a smectic A phase is investigated by low-frequency shear and compression experiments. We find that both the isotropic and the smectic A phase have their own characteristic viscoelastic behavior,:which seems to be independent of the compound under investigation and thus universal. The relaxation in-the isotropic phase shows a distribution of relaxation times, which gives rise to a scaling law of the elastic moduli with an exponent of 0.5. The viscoelastic response in the smectic A phase,however, exhibits a much broader spectrum of relaxation times containing very long-lived modes. It appears that there exists a low-frequency scaling law with an exponent of 0.3 characterizing the smectic A phase. We propose that this result stems from a transient smectic network with a very long lifetime that was set up by the smectic domains. At the phase transition, this transient smectic network disappears, which leads to a sharp decrease of the dynamic shear as well as the compression modulus.