Selected macroscopic properties of liquid crystalline elastomers

In this short review we give an overview of selected macroscopic properties of sidechain liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) focusing on three closely related topics (a) the influence of relative rotations between the director and the strain field on various reorientation instabilities, (b) the nonlinear stress-strain curves for the polydomain-monodomain transition and for the reorientation transition in LCE monodomains and (c) the shear mechanical response of LCEs in the linear regime. We consider only already existing real materials and do not discuss hypothetical ideal systems. We conclude that all observations reported to date can be accounted for without invoking the concept of soft elasticity, but instead relying on macroscopic dynamics in the linear and the nonlinear domain.