Universal fluctuations of growing interfaces: evidence in turbulent liquid crystals.

We investigate growing interfaces of topological-defect turbulence in the electroconvection of nematic liquid crystals. The interfaces exhibit self-affine roughening characterized by both spatial and temporal scaling laws of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang theory in 1+1 dimensions. Moreover, we reveal that the distribution and the two-point correlation of the interface fluctuations are universal ones governed by the largest eigenvalue of random matrices. This provides quantitative experimental evidence of the universality prescribing detailed information of scale-invariant fluctuations.

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