Intermittency at the DSM1-DSM2 transition in nematic liquid crystal films

In this letter we report on the turbulence to turbulence transition, which occurs in a homogeneously oriented nematic liquid crystal (NLC) film under the action of an external alternate voltage. Our observation show that the transition is characterized by a NLC-substrate anchoring breaking, which results in the on set of the twist distortion of the molecular director field. We give the characterization of the different dynamic regimes in terms of the probability distribution fimctions (PDF’s) of the director field curvature energy. The PDF’s, which are undoubtedly non-gaussian, indicate that, in both turbulent regimes, the curvature energy is highly intermittent.