Dirty, Skewed, and Backwards: The Smectic $A$-$C$ Phase Transition in Aerogel

Abstract

We study the smectic AC transition in anisotropic and uniaxial disordered environments, e.g., aerogel with an external field. We find very strange behavior of translational correlations: the low-temperature, lower-symmetry Smectic C phase is itless translationally ordered than the it high-temperature, higher-symmetry Smectic A phase, with short-ranged and algebraic translational correlations, respectively. Specifically, the A and C phase belong to the quasi-long-ranged translationally ordered " XY Bragg glass '' and short-ranged translationally ordered " m=1 Bragg glass '' phase, respectively. The AC phase transition itself belongs to a new universality class, whose fixed points and exponents we find in a d=5-epsilon expansion.

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Smectic-A and Smectic-C Phases and Phase Transitions in Liquid Crystal-Aerosil Gels
• The Smectic A to C Phase Transition in Isotropic Disordered Environments
• Smectics $A$ and $C$, and the Transition between them, in Uniaxial Disordered Environments
• Phase transitions and continuously variable scaling in a chiral quenched disordered model
• The Smectic $A$-$C$ Phase Transition in Biaxial Disordered Environments