Experimental study of spinodal decomposition in a 1D conserved order parameter system

We study the zigzag instability coarsening of splay-bend walls formed in a nematic liquid crystal under external fields. The vertexes of zigzag can be considered as kinks in a one-dimensional order parameter system and the geometrical constraints associated with the necessary equal length sum of zig...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2004-04, Vol.92 (14), p.145504-145504, Article 145504
Main Authors: Nagaya, Tomoyuki, Gilli, Jean-Marc
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Optics
Physics
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Summary:We study the zigzag instability coarsening of splay-bend walls formed in a nematic liquid crystal under external fields. The vertexes of zigzag can be considered as kinks in a one-dimensional order parameter system and the geometrical constraints associated with the necessary equal length sum of zig and zag segments impose a conserved quantity in this Cahn-Hilliard-type problem. In the late stage of coarsening, the characteristic length of the system L(t) shows a logarithmic increase in time and the dynamical scaling law holds. We then try to extract the nontrivial asymptotic scaling exponent lambda of the two-time correlation function, defined by lim(
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/physrevlett.92.145504