Abstract
Recently, it has been, shown that liquid crystals possess a variety of nonlinear optical mechanisms existing over a large range of time scales from ps to ms.1,2 Of particular interest are those based on thermal, orientational, and density excitations, which exist even in isotropic phase and exhibit rise times of a few to tens of nanoseconds. Here, we demonstrate how these nonlinearities can be exploited to construct a fast optical limiting device with threshold energy fluences of µJ/cm2 and lower. An interesting multiple- limiting behavior has also been observed, the origin of which is traced to the multiple nonlinearities of liquid crystals induced by the laser pulse.
© 1993 Optical Society of America
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