Where are the Hedgehogs in Nematics?

Abstract

In experiments which take a liquid crystal rapidly from the isotropic to the nematic phase, a dense tangle of defects is formed. In nematics, there are in principle both line and point defects (``hedgehogs''), but no point defects are observed until the defect network has coarsened appreciably. In this letter the expected density of point defects is shown to be extremely low, approximately $10^{-8}$ per initially correlated domain, as result of the topology (specifically, the homology) of the order parameter space.

6 pages, latex, 1 figure (self-unpacking PostScript).

References in corpus (4)

• The Cosmological Kibble Mechanism in the Laboratory: String Formation in Liquid Crystals
• Formation of Topological Defects at First Order Phase Transitions
• On the Production of Flux Vortices and Magnetic Monopoles in Phase Transitions
• Statistical Properties of Strings

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Morphogenesis of defects and tactoids during isotropic-nematic phase transition in self-assembled lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals
• Topological Defects in Nematic Droplets of Hard Spherocylinders
• Observing Correlated Production of Defects-Antidefects in Liquid Crystals
• Phase-ordering dynamics of the Gay-Berne nematic liquid crystal
• Disclination loop behavior near the nematic-isotropic transition
• Phase Transitions In Two Planar Lattice Models And Topological Defects: A Monte Carlo Study
• Dynamical Scaling In Two Dimensional Quenched Uniaxial Nematic Liquid Crystals
• Topological Transition to a Critical Phase in a Two-dimensional 3-Vector Model with non-Abelian Fundamental Group: A Simulational Study