Dendritic growth of a discotic liquid crystal

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Abstract
The first experiment on the dendritic growth of a discotic hexagonal mesophase is reported. The chosen liquid crystal is the hexaoctyloxytriphenylene. We measured the stability constant of a dendrite (defined as σ*= 2Dd 0/Vρ2 ) and the sidebranch spacing λ. D is a diffusion coefficient, do the capillary length, p the tip radius of the dendrite and V its velocity. Recent theories based on a mecanism of microscopic solvability show that (σ* and λ/ρ are only function of the anisotropy ε6 of the surface tension. We measured ε 6 in order to make a comparison between the experimental values of (σ* and λ/ρ and those theoretically calculated via ω 6. We found a good qualitative agreement between theory and experiment