Broken living layers: Dislocations in active smectic liquid crystals
Broken living layers: Dislocations in active smectic liquid crystals
We show that dislocations in active two-dimensional (2D) smectic liquid crystals with underlying rotational symmetry are always unbound in the presence of noise, meaning the active smectic phase does not exist for nonzero noise in $d=2$. The active smectic phase can, like equilibrium smectics in 2D, be stabilized by applying …