Experimental test of curvature-driven dynamics in the phase ordering of a two dimensional liquid crystal

Abstract

We study electric field driven deracemization in an achiral liquid crystal through the formation and coarsening of chiral domains. It is proposed that deracemization in this system is a curvature-driven process. We test this prediction using the exact result for the distribution of hull-enclosed areas in two-dimensional coarsening in non-conserved scalar order parameter dynamics recently obtained [J.J. Arenzon et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 061116 (2007)]. The experimental data are in very good agreement with the theory. We thus demonstrate that deracemization in such bent-core liquid crystals belongs to the Allen-Cahn universality class, and that the exact formula, which gives us the statistics of domain sizes during coarsening, can also be used as a strict test for this dynamic universality class.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Exact results for curvature-driven coarsening in two dimensions
• Domain growth morphology in curvature driven two dimensional coarsening
• Geometric properties of two-dimensional coarsening with weak disorder

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