Impact of noise on domain growth in electroconvection

The growth and ordering of striped domains has recently received renewed attention due in part to experimental studies in diblock copolymers and electroconvection. One surprising result has been the relatively slow dynamics associated with the growth of striped domains. One potential source of the slow dynamics is the pinning of defects in the periodic potential of the stripes. Of interest is whether or not external noise will have a significant impact on the domain ordering, perhaps by reducing the pinning and increasing the rate of ordering. In contrast, we present experiments using electroconvection in which we show that a particular type of external noise decreases the rate of domain ordering.