RELATING DOMAIN SHAPE TO GROWTH VELOCITY ANISOTROPY - INHERENT SYMMETRY OF THE WULFF CONSTRUCTION

The Wulff construction relates the equilibrium shape of a crystal to i ts anisotropic surface tension profile, and, in a formally equivalent way, relates the shape of an evolving domain to its anisotropic growth velocity profile. We demonstrate explicitly the underlying complement arity and symmetry between these real space shapes and their generatin g profiles. By exploiting this symmetry, we have developed a simplifie d method for determining velocity profiles from the shapes of growing domains, demonstrated here for polarization reversal domains in ferroe lectric liquid crystals.