Abstract

Nematic liquid crystals exhibit large optical nonlinearities in response to laser fields. Since these materials are highly transparent in the visible, they are attractive candidate materials for device applications. A variety of mechanisms are responsible for the observed nonlinearities, operating on different time scales. In earlier studies, the response on the nanosecond timescale was investigated in a geometry where director reorientation is not expected to occur. In the present work, nonlinear absorption on the picosecond timescale is studied in detail.

© 1995 Optical Society of America