Light-induced multistability and Freedericksz transition in nematic liquid crystals
Optics
2007-05-23 v1
Abstract
We study light transmission through a homeotropically oriented nematic liquid crystal cell and solve self-consistently a nonlinear equation for the nematic director coupled to Maxwell's equations. We demonstrate that above a certain threshold of the input light intensity, the liquid-crystal cell changes abruptly its optical properties due to the light-induced Freedericksz transition, demonstrating multistable hysteresis-like dependencies in the transmission. We suggest that these properties can be employed for tunable all-optical switching photonic devices based on liquid crystals.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.physics/0604162,
title = {Light-induced multistability and Freedericksz transition in nematic liquid crystals},
author = {Andrey E. Miroshnichenko and Igor Pinkevych and Yuri S. Kivshar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0604162},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
7 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. E