We present observations of strength-one defects and antidefects formed in isotropic-nematic phase transition of a thin layer of nematic liquid crystals, using optical microscopy. We measure the widths of the distributions of net winding number in small regions, and determine the exponent characterizing the correlation between defects and antidefects to be 0.26±0.11, in very good agreement with the value 1/4 predicted by the Kibble mechanism for defect production. We also describe a novel technique to determine the director distribution in observations of defect networks.
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Digal et al. (1999) studied this question.
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