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Updated: Nov 29, 2025

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Prewavy instability-originated dielectric chevrons of electroconvection in nematic liquid crystals
Masato Shiomi1, E-Joon Choi2, Jong-Hoon Huh1
1Department of Physics and Information Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka 820-8502, Japan.
Abstract:
This paper reports the pattern formation and evolution in a high-frequency dielectric regime observed in the AC-driven electroconvection of nematic liquid crystals (NLCs). It is determined that prewavy (PW) instability is essential for the formation and evolution. Specifically, in a twisted-aligned NLC cell, we observe a unique pattern that is comparable to the dielectric chevrons (DCVs) typically observed in a conventional planarly aligned pattern. It is determined to be a combined PW pattern with dielectric normal rolls (DNRs). Moreover, the power indices (α_{PW}, α_{DNR}, and α_{DCV}) are determined from the frequency-dependent thresholds (V_{th}∝f^{α}) of PW, DNR, and DCV. By taking into account the appearance of PW and the different power indices, the pattern evolution scenarios for DCV are proposed, which can well explain the previous experimental results. Specifically, the PW-originated DCV2 clearly differs from the defect-mediated DCV1, which is known as a typical pattern evolution.
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