Physics of the dowser texture

The generic experiment started with the homeotropic texture filling the droplet, except for an annular domain of residual dowser texture in vicinity of the meniscus. Since the discovery of its persistence, the dowser texture was studied with the particular aim of generating and manipulating monopoles. The experiments started by the generation of a unique homeotropic-in-dowser domain by means of a reduction of the gap slide/lens thickness to zero. CDC2 was tailored for the winding of the dowser texture and for experiments on the generation, motions and collisions of dowsons. All experiments on the flow-assisted homeotropic-dowser transition were made with 4-cyano-4’-pentylbiphenyl (5CB). Values of the flexo-electric polarizations in MBBA and 5CB have been measured in experiments performed with weak enough electric field to neglect the contribution of the second-order term due to dielectric anisotropy. An experiment performed with 5CB provides evidence of electro-osmotic flows in a wound up dowser texture submitted to a strong electric field.