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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Controlling Flow Speeds of Microtubule-Based 3D Active Fluids Using Temperature
Published on: November 26, 2019
Aging and effective temperatures near a critical point
S Joubaud1, B Percier, A Petrosyan
1Université de Lyon, Laboratoire de Physique, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, CNRS, 46, Allée d'Italie, 69364 Lyon Cedex 07, France.
Abstract:
The orientation fluctuations of the director of a liquid crystal are measured after a quench near the Fréedericksz transition, which is a second order transition driven by an electric field. We report experimental evidence that, because of the critical slowing down, the liquid crystal presents several properties of an aging system after the quench, such as power law scaling in times of correlation and response functions. During this slow relaxation, a well defined effective temperature, much larger than the heat bath temperature, can be measured using the fluctuation dissipation relation.
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