An. Pargellis et al., DYNAMICS OF MONOPOLE ANNIHILATION BY TYPE-1 2 STRINGS IN A NEMATIC LIQUID-CRYSTAL/, Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics, 53(1), 1996, pp. 25-28
In uniaxial nematic liquid crystals, monopoles can be annihilated by t
ype-1/2 strings. We present experimental measurements on the dynamics
of this process as well as others, including loop collapses and monopo
le-pair annihilations. On dimensional grounds one expects the size of
a collapsing structure in a nematic liquid crystal to scale as tau(1/2
) where tau is the time to annihilation. Indeed, type-1/2 loops and mo
nopole-antimonopole pairs exhibit this kind of behavior. In contrast,
for monopole annihilation by a type-(1/2) string we find that the stri
ng-monopole separation scales as tau(alpha) where alpha = 0.629+/-0.00
6.