Abstract
We experimentally and numerically show that chirality can play a major role in the nonlinear optical response of soft birefringent materials, by studying the nonlinear propagation of laser beams in frustrated cholesteric liquid crystal samples. Such beams exhibit a periodic nonlinear response associated with a bouncing pattern for the optical fields, as well as a self-focusing effect enhanced by the chirality of the birefringent material. Our results open new possible designs of nonlinear optical devices with low power consumption and tunable interactions with localized topological solitons.
Highlights
We experimentally and numerically show that chirality can play a major role in the nonlinear optical response of soft birefringent materials, by studying the nonlinear propagation of laser beams in frustrated cholesteric liquid crystal samples
Since the nonlocal elastic reorientation of molecules under the action of an external optical field is known to give rise to nonlinear optical effects and spatial optical solitons in achiral liquid crystal [5,17]—dubbed nematicons—the following important question arises: How does the intrinsic chirality of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) affect the nonlinear optical response of this birefringent material? previous experiments and simulations showed the existence of optical solitons in CLC with the usual cholesteric helix texture [18,19,20], this question was never answered since these works focused on bistability, waveguiding and elastic anisotropy and not on the optical nonlinearity itself
Contrary to previous observation of solitons in CLC [18,19,20], we focus here on frustrated CLC (FCLC) in which the equilibrium state of the director field n is not the well-known cholesteric helix—which is associated with a periodicity length p, called the CLC pitch—but the much simpler unwound uniform state n0
Summary
We experimentally and numerically show that chirality can play a major role in the nonlinear optical response of soft birefringent materials, by studying the nonlinear propagation of laser beams in frustrated cholesteric liquid crystal samples. Such beams exhibit a periodic nonlinear response associated with a bouncing pattern for the optical fields, as well as a self-focusing effect enhanced by the chirality of the birefringent material.
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