Glassy dynamics in relaxation of soft-mode turbulence

Abstract

The autocorrelation function of pattern fluctuation is used to study soft-mode turbulence (SMT), a spatiotemporal chaos observed in homeotropic nematics. We show that relaxation near the electroconvection threshold deviates from the exponential. To describe this relaxation, we propose a compressed exponential appearing in dynamics of glass forming liquids. Our findings suggest that coherent motion contributes to SMT dynamics. We also confirmed that characteristic time is inversely proportional to electroconvection's control parameter.Comment: 4pages, 3 figure