A nonlinear small-strain elastic theory is constructed from a systematic expansion in Biot strains, truncated at quadratic order. The primary motivation the desire for clean separation between stretching and bending energies shells, which appears to arise only reduction of bulk energy this type. An approximation isotropic invariants, bypassing solution quartic equation or computation tensor squ...

Solid liquid crystals, formed by crosslinking polymeric nematics into elastomers are shown to display novel and complex elasticity. The internal (nematic) direction can experience a barrier to its rotation which couples to standard elasticity. We investigate this elasticity by considering imposed strains and demonstrate several new orientational phase transitions, caused by the interaction betw...