Eur. Phys. J. E (2009) 30: 403-409
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2009-10539-x

Regular Article

Dynamics of point defects and stripe textures in Smectic-C Langmuir monolayers

Institut de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia, and Departament de Química Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Martí i Franquès 1, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

^* e-mail: jignes@ub.edu

Received: 17 June 2009
Revised: 28 October 2009
Accepted: 6 November 2009
Published online: 9 December 2009

Abstract

Langmuir monolayers of an azobenzene fatty acid derivative have been studied experimentally in a regime where confined domains with Smectic-C order form spontaneously. Coalescence of domains results in a dynamics of formation and annihilation of point defects and string-like distortions of the molecular field amenable to semi-quantitative analysis. Absence of backflow and layer thickness effects enables us to extract values for material parameters from the analysis of defect dynamics.