Sicilia A, Arenzon JJ, Dierking I, Bray AJ, Cugliandolo LF, Martínez-Perdiguero J, Alonso I, Pintre IC. Experimental test of curvature-driven dynamics in the phase ordering of a two dimensional liquid crystal.
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS 2008;
101:197801. [PMID:
19113314 DOI:
10.1103/physrevlett.101.197801]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/13/2008] [Indexed: 05/27/2023]
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 recently obtained exact result for the distribution of hull-enclosed 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.
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