title: Universal fluctuations of growing interfaces: evidence in turbulent liquid crystals.
abstract: We investigate growing interfaces of topological-defect turbulence in the electroconvection of nematic liquid crystals. The interfaces exhibit self-affine roughening characterized by both spatial and temporal scaling laws of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang theory in 1+1 dimensions. Moreover, we reveal that the distribution and the two-point correlation of the interface fluctuations are universal ones governed by the largest eigenvalue of random matrices. This provides quantitative experimental evidence of the universality prescribing detailed information of scale-invariant fluctuations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan. kazumasa@daisy.phys.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
authors.forename: Kazumasa A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Takeuchi
authors.forename: Masaki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sano