The Smectic A to C Phase Transition in Isotropic Disordered Environments

Abstract

We study theoretically the smectic A to C phase transition in isotropic disordered environments. Surprisingly, we find that, as in the clean smectic A to C phase transition, smectic layer fluctuations do not affect the nature of the transition, in spite of the fact that they are much stronger in the presence of the disorder. As a result, we find that the universality class of the transition is that of the "Random field XY model" (RFXY).

References in corpus (4)

• Smectic Liquid Crystals in an Anisotropic Random Environment
• Smectic-A and Smectic-C Phases and Phase Transitions in Liquid Crystal-Aerosil Gels
• Smectics $A$ and $C$, and the Transition between them, in Uniaxial Disordered Environments
• The Smectic $A$-$C$ Phase Transition in Biaxial Disordered Environments