Crawling and spiraling of cholesteric fingers in electric field

Abstract

We show that two types of fingers exist in homeotropic samples of cholesteric liquid crystals of positive dielectric anisotropy : fingers of a first species in which the director field is continuous, and fingers of a second species which are topologically singular and of the same nature as spherulites (also called cholesteric bubbles). When the former are subjected to a low frequency AC electric field, they crawl slowly along their axes whereas the latter drift perpendicularly to their axes and form spirals when one of their ends is pinned on a defect. This work supplements spirals recently observed in Nice by Kamaye and Gilli [8] and by Mitov and Sixou [9] in similar systems.