Smectic liquid crystals in random environments
Smectic liquid crystals in random environments
We study smectic liquid crystals in random environments, e.g., aerogel. A low-temperature analysis reveals that even arbitrarily weak quenched disorder (i.e., arbitrarily low aerogel density) destroys translational (smectic) order, in agreement with recent experimental results. A harmonic approximation to the elastic energy suggests that there may be no ``smectic Bragg …