Enhanced Thermal Lens Effect in Gold Nanoparticle-Doped Lyotropic Liquid Crystal by Nanoparticle Clustering Probed by Z-Scan Technique

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This work presents an experimental study of the thermal lens effect in Au nanoparticles-doped lyotropic liquid crystals under cw 532 nm optical excitation. Spherical Au nanoparticles of about 12 nm were prepared by Turkevich's method, and the lyotropic liquid crystal was a ternary mixture of SDS, 1-DeOH, and water that exhibits an isotropic phase at room temperature. The lyotropic matrix induces aggregation of the nanoparticles, leading to a broad and a red-shifted surface plasmon resonance. The thermal nonlinear optical refraction coefficient n2 increases as a power of number density of nanoparticles, being possi- ble to address this behavior to nanoparticle clustering.