The effect of initial alignment on the optical properties of Fe3O4 nanoparticles doped in nematic liquid crystals

Abstract

Recently the nonlinear effects of the different materials doped liquid crystals are more interesting. In all previous works, nonlinearity of samples with the homeotropic alignment is investigated because of the larger component of the refractive index in this direction. Here, there are spherical Fe3O4 nanoparticles that have both parallel and perpendicular components. We were looking for the effect of initial alignment on the nonlinearity of pure and doped nematic liquid crystals (NLCs). The experimental results emphasize, even the same compositional percentage of nanoparticles prepared by two different alignment configurations are showing different results when dispersed in the same NLCs. Comparing nonlinear studies, the magnitude of nonlinear refraction index, n2 and nonlinear absorption coefficient, β increase 102 and 101 times, respectively, in homeotropic alignment samples and the sign of these parameters is changed rather than homogeneous ones.