Universal description of viscoelasticity with foliation preserving diffeomorphisms

Understand

We review our recent proposal for a universal description of generic single-component viscoelastic systems with a single relaxation time.

• Foliation preserving diffeomorphisms are introduced as an underlying symmetry which naturally interpolates between the two extreme characters of elasticity and fluidity.
• The symmetry is found to be powerful enough to determine the dynamics in the first order of strains.