Dirt Softens Soap: Anomalous Elasticity of Disordered Smectics
Dirt Softens Soap: Anomalous Elasticity of Disordered Smectics
We show that a smectic in a disordered medium (e.g., aerogel) exhibits anomalous elasticity, with the compression modulus $B(\mathbf{k})$ vanishing and the bend modulus $K(\mathbf{k})$ diverging as $\mathbf{k}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$. In addition, the effective disorder develops long ranged correlations. These divergences are much stronger than those driven by thermal fluctuations in pure …