Nonlinear Optical Propagation in a Dye-Doped Nematic Liquid Crystal Waveguide

Abstract

A dye-doped nematic liquid crystal slab waveguide with an infinite homogeneous isotropic cladding is considered. The problem of light propagation in such a system is solved by a set of coupled nonlinear differential equations. This equation set is directly derived from the exact Maxwell's equations for the light and the torque balance equations for the medium response. The optical field amplitudes and the molecular director distributions are computed by means of a numerical technique based on the continuation method. The numerical results give evidence for a threshold effect, OFT-like. Above threshold, degeneration of modes and self-induced spatial splitting of the guided beam occur. Among the possible applications we propose a nonlinear switch for integrated optics.