Annihilation dynamics of reverse tilt domains in nematic liquid crystals

Reverse tilt domains are induced in a nematic liquid crystal confined in cells with near-zero pretilt angle homogeneous alignment. The domains emerge in the shape of “closed loops” and will annihilate over a time scale of seconds to minutes. The annihilation dynamics of single isolated domains as well as the coarsening dynamics of a number of domains are investigated in detail. The system maps onto the uniform Ising model and is characterized by a single length scale L(t). The dynamical scaling laws previously proposed for coarsening dynamics of topological defects in symmetry breaking phase transitions are verified also for the electric field induced reverse tilt domains while varying external parameters, including electric field amplitude, frequency, temperature and cell gap.