Abstract
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 . The active smectic phase can, like equilibrium smectics in 2D, be stabilized by applying rotational symmetry-breaking fields; however, even in the presence of such fields, active smectics are still much less stable against noise than equilibrium ones, when the symmetry-breaking field(s) are weak.
- Received 11 July 2022
- Accepted 24 October 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.106.054607
©2022 American Physical Society