Light-transmission study of coarsening in a nematic liquid crystal.

Abstract

We have used light transmission to follow for four decades in time the annealing of defects generated by pressure jumps in a uniaxial liquid crystal. Two distinct scaling regimes for the light intensity as a function of time were observed: an early-time regime in which light propagates diffusively to the detector, and a late-time regime in which unscattered light dominates the signal reaching the detector. The measured values for the scaling exponent \ensuremath{\nu} for the string density ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\rho}}}_{\mathit{s}}$\ensuremath{\propto}${\mathit{t}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\ensuremath{\nu}}$ are within 10% of the expected value \ensuremath{\nu}=1 over the time interval 10 msect100 sec.