Observing correlated production of defects and antidefects in liquid crystals

被引：54

作者：

Digal, S ^{[1
]}

Ray, R ^{[1
]}

Srivastava, AM ^{[1
]}

机构：

[1] Inst Phys, Bhubaneswar 751005, Orissa, India

来源：

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS | 1999年 / 83卷 / 24期

关键词：

D O I：

10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.5030

中图分类号：

O4 [物理学];

学科分类号：

0702 ;

摘要：

We present observations of strength-one defects and antidefects formed in isotropic-nematic phase transition of a thin layer of nematic liquid crystals, using optical microscopy. We measure the widths of the distributions of net winding number in small regions, and determine the exponent characterizing the correlation between defects and antidefects to be 0.26 +/- 0.11, in very good agreement with the value 1/4 predicted by the Kibble mechanism for defect production. We also describe a novel technique to determine the director distribution in observations of defect networks.

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页码：5030 / 5033

页数：4

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