Abstract
We study the dynamic behavior near the isotropic-nematic transition in liquid crystalline sidechain polymers using a mode coupling technique as applied to the life-time renormalization. To lowest order in mode coupling we find for the dynamical critical exponent z for the relaxation time of the order parameter the value z = 1.5 while in mean field approximation one obtains z = 1. This result is in agreement with recent experiments done in Martinoty's group on two different classes of sidechain liquid crystalline polymers using electric and acoustic birefringence measurements. This qualitative difference in behaviour between low molecular weight systems and sidechain polymers can be traced back to nonlinear (cubic) cross coupling terms in the generalized energy between the order parameter and the strain associated with the transient network. The importance of such nonlinear cross coupling terms is corroborated further by recent measurements of the dynamic stress-optical coefficient in sidechain elastomers.
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