Abstract
Interfacial patterns in a Hele-Shaw cell1 with no anisotropy are disordered2, and in the limit of vanishing surface tension the viscous fingers develop into a fractal structure3,4 as a consequence of a cascade of tip splittings. By engraving a grid into the plates of the cell, Ben-Jacob et al.5 demonstrated the role of a model anisotropy in hydrodynamic systems. Here we introduce an experimental system which uses a nematic liquid crystal as the viscous fluid, so that there is anisotropy in the medium itself. We find that the effective anisotropy6 may be tuned by varying the pressure with which the low-viscosity liquid (air, in our case) enters the cell. As a result we obtain re-entrant morphological transitions between random patterns (tip splitting) and quasi-regular patterns qualitatively resembling dendritic growth (stable tips).
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Buka, A., Kertész, J. & Vicsek, T. Transitions of viscous fingering patterns in nematic liquid crystals. Nature 323, 424–425 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1038/323424a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/323424a0
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