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

• Autor(a) principal: Sicilia, Alberto
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Outros Autores: Arenzon, Jeferson Jacob, Dierking, Ingo, Bray, Alan J., Cugliandolo, Leticia F., Martínez Perdiguero, Josu, Alonso, Ibon, Pintre, Inmaculada C.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRGS
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10183/99407
• topic: Transformações de fase; Transformacoes de ordem-desordem; Moléculas; Cristais líquidos

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 recently obtained exact result for the distribution of hullenclosed areas in two-dimensional coarsening with nonconserved scalar order parameter dynamics [J. J. Arenzon et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 145701 (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.