Abstract
A thin sheet of nematic elastomer attains 3D configurations depending on the nematic director field upon heating. In this Letter, we describe the intrinsic geometry of such a sheet and derive an expression for the metric induced by general nematic director fields. Furthermore, we investigate the reverse problem of constructing a director field that induces a specified 2D geometry. We provide an explicit recipe for how to construct any surface of revolution using this method. Finally, we show that by inscribing a director field gradient across the sheet's thickness, one can obtain a nontrivial hyperbolic reference curvature tensor, which together with the prescription of a reference metric allows dictation of actual configurations for a thin sheet of nematic elastomer.
Original language | American English |
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Article number | 257801 |
Journal | Physical Review Letters |
Volume | 113 |
Issue number | 25 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 17 Dec 2014 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2014 American Physical Society.