Emergence of disordered branching patterns in confined chiral nematic liquid crystals

Abstract

Spatial branching processes are ubiquitous in nature, yet the mechanisms that drive their growth may vary significantly from one system to another. In soft matter physics, chiral nematic liquid crystals provide a controlled setting to study the emergence and growth dynamic of disordered branching patterns. Via an appropriate forcing, a cholesteric phase may nucleate in a chiral nematic liquid crystal, which self-organizes into an extended branching pattern. It is known that branching events take place when the rounded tips of cholesteric fingers swell, become unstable, and split into two new cholesteric tips. The origin of this interfacial instability and the mechanisms that drive the large-scale spatial organization of these cholesteric patterns remain unclear. In this work, we investigate experimentally the spatial and temporal organization of thermally driven branching patterns in chiral nematic liquid crystal cells. We describe the observations through a mean-field model and find that chirality is responsible for the creation of fingers, regulates their interactions, and controls the tip-splitting process. Furthermore, we show that the complex dynamics of the cholesteric pattern behaves as a probabilistic process of branching and inhibition of chiral tips that drives the large-scale topological organization. Our theoretical findings are in good agreement with the experimental observations.