Related papers: All-optical switching and multistability in photon…
We demonstrate deterministic control of branched flow of light using anisotropic nematic liquid crystals. By sculpting the director field via photoalignment, we create spatially programmable optical potentials that govern light scattering…
Non-linear photonic crystals can be used to provide phase-matching for frequency conversion in optically isotropic materials. The phase-matching mechanism proposed here is a combination of form birefringence and phase velocity dispersion in…
Photonic crystals create dramatic new possibilities for nonlinear optics. Line defects are shown to support modes suitable for the production of pairs of photons by the material's second order nonlinearity even if the phase-matching…
We theoretically investigate the possibility of realizing a nonlinear all-optical diode by using the unique features of quasiperiodic 1D photonic crystals. The interplay between the intrinsic spatial asymmetry in odd-order Thue-Morse…
Much is known about the Freedericksz transition induced by uniform electric and magnetic fields in nematic liquid crystals. Here we study the effects of a spatially varying field on the transition. We study the response of a nematic to a…
Electric field-induced splay of molecular orientation, called the Fr\'eedericksz transition, is a fundamental electro-optic phenomenon in nonpolar nematic liquid crystals. In a ferroelectric nematic NF with a spontaneous electric…
We report on the alignment transition of a nematic liquid crystal from initially homeotropic to quasi-planar due to field-induced anchoring breaking. The initial homeotropic alignment is achieved by Langmuir-Blodgett monolayers. In this…
Optomechanical systems provide a unique platform for observing quantum behavior of macroscopic objects. However, efforts towards realizing nonlinear behavior at the single photon level have been inhibited by the small size of the radiation…
An optical switch based on liquid-crystal tunable long-range metal stripe waveguides is proposed and theoretically investigated. A nematic liquid crystal layer placed between a vertical configuration consisting of two gold stripes is shown…
The control of light through all-optical means is a fundamental challenge in nanophotonics and a key effect in optical switching and logic. The optical bistability effect enables this control and can be observed in various planar photonic…
Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…
Electro-hydrodynamic phenomena in liquid crystals constitute an old but still very active research area. The reason is that these phenomena play the key role in various applications of liquid crystals and due to the general interest of…
Theoretical study of dynamical phenomena induced by a linearly polarized plane wave incident perpendicularly on a planar aligned nematic layer with the light intensity as the control parameter is reported. We find the threshold of the…
Topological photonics harnesses the physics of topological insulators to control the behavior of light. Photonic modes robust against material imperfections are an example of such control. In this work, we propose a soft-matter platform…
A localized defect mode in a photonic-layered structure develops nodal points. Placing a thin metallic layer at such a nodal point results in the phenomenon of induced transparency. We demonstrate that if this nodal point is not a point of…
The phenomena of crystal size changes and structural phase transitions induced by light irradiation have garnered significant interest due to their potential for tuning and controlling a wide range of material properties through highly…
A liquid crystal optical device made of an optically anisotropic heterostructure is considered. The device consists of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) layer sandwiched by two phase-shifting anisotropic layers of a nematic liquid crystal…
Nonlinear optics underpins a broad range of photonic technologies, from classical and quantum light sources to emerging nonlinear photonic neural networks. Yet, conventional nonlinear optical devices exhibit static functionality: their…
We present nonlinear dynamic equations for nematic and smectic $A$ liquid crystals in the presence of an alternating electric field and explain their derivation in detail. The local electric field acting in any liquid-crystalline system is…
We introduce topological defect to a square lattice of elliptical cylinders. Despite the broken translational symmetry, the long-range positional order of the cylinders leads to residual photonic bandgap in the density of optical states.…