Elasticity bounds from Effective Field Theory

Abstract: Phonons in solid materials can be understood as the Goldstone bosons of the spontaneously broken spacetime symmetries. As such their low energy dynamics are greatly constrained and can be captured by standard effective field theory (EFT) methods. In particular, knowledge of the nonlinear stress-strain curves completely fixes the full effective Lagrangian at leading order in derivatives. We attempt to illustrate the potential of effective methods focusing on the so-called hyperelastic materials, which allow large elastic deformations. We find that the self-consistency of the EFT imposes a number of bounds on physical quantities, mainly on the maximum strain and maximum stress that can be supported by the medium. In particular, for stress-strain relations that at large deformations are characterized by a power-law behaviour $\sigma(\varepsilon)\sim \varepsilon^\nu$, the maximum strain exhibits a sharp correlation with the exponent $\nu$.