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

Leiming Chen·John Toner
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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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Leiming Chen, John Toner. 2004-07-28. Dirty, Skewed, and Backwards: The Smectic $A$-$C$ Phase Transition in Aerogel. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.94.137803

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