Abstract
ABSTRACT Nematic Liquid Crystals are birefringent soft matter exhibiting unique nonlocal and nonlinear optical properties. Due to the interaction with finite-size light beams, self-focusing via molecular reorientation can balance out diffraction and result in self-confined beams, namely spatial solitons or nematicons, operating as waveguides for copolarized optical signals. Since nematicon propagation and confinement are determined by material properties that can be tailored by external fields, they allow implementing various photonic functionalities: from signal steering and addressing to bistability, from topological and optical symmetry breaking to beaming of random laser emission, to mention a few. Such proof-of-principle applications make nematic liquid crystals and nematicons a versatile platform for the study of complex light–matter interactions in nonlocal dielectrics and the demonstration of all-optical photonic devices for signal processing.
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