Abstract
When submitted to a constant deformation, homeotropic samples of Sm A relax towards equilibrium with two time constants, one of them (shorter) characteristic of the climb of edge dislocations of the grain boundary which in practice is always found in the middle plane of the sample, the other one (longer) characteristic of a sequence of helical instabilities of the screw dislocations which, although metastable, are always present in the sample. This instability occurs for an integral number of pitches of the helix in the thickness of the sample. Experiment matches with the theory developed in [9] for static deformations and extended here to the dynamical regime