Abstract
The orientation fluctuations of the director of a liquid crystal are measured by a sensitive polarization interferometer, close to the Fréedericksz transition, which is a second-order transition driven by an electric field. We show that near the critical value of the field the spatially averaged order parameter has a generalized Gumbel distribution instead of a Gaussian distribution. The latter is recovered away from the critical point. We also show that after a quench at the critical point the system presents ageing properties.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge useful discussion with R. Benzi, P. Holdsworth and J.F. Pinton. This work has been partially supported by ANR-05-BLAN-0105-01.