Nematic Elastomers

			Georg Dolzmann 
			Department of Mathematics
			University of Maryland


A modern trend in the calculus of variations which originates from
applications in physics and materials science is to try to identify in a
mathematically rigorous way limiting theories for complex systems. Often a
lot of information about a given system can be obtained by analyzing a
coarse-grained energy which describes the macroscopic behavior without
resolving the finest length scale in the system. In this talk we discuss
nematic elastomers as a model system for which the coarse-grained energy
can be found analytically. We discuss the surprising predictions that
result from this description.