Abstract

Nonlinear effects in pure nematic liquid crystals require high-input powers. The addition of a small amount of certain types of dyes strongly reduces this requirement [1]. Especially when nematics liquid crystals are doped with azo-dyes, their nonlinear response to opto-electrical perturbations is increased by several orders of magnitude [2]. Recently, we have shown that, phase transition, induced doped liquid crystal, is characterized by a nonuniform front propagation between the nematic and the isotropic phases, when the laser intensity crosses a threshold [3]. We propose to study experimentally, theoretically and numerically the influence of a twisted nematic liquid crystal on the photo-isomerization transition, submitted to a Gaussian external forcing.

© 2015 IEEE