title: Experimental study of spinodal decomposition in a 1D conserved order parameter system.
abstract: We study the zigzag instability coarsening of splay-bend walls formed in a nematic liquid crystal under external fields. The vertexes of zigzag can be considered as kinks in a one-dimensional order parameter system and the geometrical constraints associated with the necessary equal length sum of zig and zag segments impose a conserved quantity in this Cahn-Hilliard-type problem. In the late stage of coarsening, the characteristic length of the system L(t) shows a logarithmic increase in time and the dynamical scaling law holds. We then try to extract the nontrivial asymptotic scaling exponent lambda of the two-time correlation function, defined by lim(<phi(0,t)phi(0,t('))> approximately [L(t)/L(t('))](-lambda). The scaling exponents with respective time references, t(')=32 and 64 s, after quench are found to be lambda approximately 2 which is larger than the value with respective time reference t(')=0, predicted by numerical simulation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Okayama University, 3-1-1 Tsushimanaka Okayama, 700-8530 Japan.
authors.forename: Tomoyuki
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nagaya
authors.forename: Jean-Marc
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Gilli