Smectic ordering in liquid-crystal-aerosil dispersions. II. Scaling analysis.

Liquid crystals offer many unique opportunities to study various phase transitions with continuous symmetry in the presence of quenched random disorder (QRD). The QRD arises from the presence of porous solids in the form of a random gel network. Experimental and theoretical work supports the view that for fixed (static) inclusions, quasi-long-range smectic order is destroyed for arbitrarily small volume fractions of the solid.