Role of initial conditions in the decay of spatially periodic patterns in a nematic liquid crystal

The decay of stripe patterns in planarly aligned nematic liquid crystals has been studied experimentally and theoretically. The initial patterns have been generated by the electrohydrodynamic instability and a light diffraction technique has been used to monitor their decay. In our experiments different decay rates have been observed as a function of the pattern wave number. According to our theoretical analysis they belong to a spectrum of decay modes and are individually selected in dependence on the initial conditions. Additional insight has emerged from a refined physical optical description of the diffraction intensity. The results compare well with experiments, which include also controlled modifications of the initial conditions to assess different decay modes.