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arXiv · hep-ph/9805502

Observing Correlated Production of Defects-Antidefects in Liquid Crystals

Sanatan Digal·Rajarshi Ray·Ajit M. Srivastava
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Abstract

We present observations of strength one defects and antidefects formed in isotropic-nematic phase transition in a thin layer of nematic liquid crystals, using a cross-polarizer setup. We measure the widths of the distributions of {\it net} winding number in small regions, and determine the exponent characterizing the correlation between defects and antidefects to be 0.26$\pm$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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Sanatan Digal, Rajarshi Ray, Ajit M. Srivastava. 1999-08-31. Observing Correlated Production of Defects-Antidefects in Liquid Crystals. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.83.5030

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