Abstract

Temporal discriminations between non linear effects involving mechanisms with different characteristic times have been, this last decade, the object of many works on organic liquids, supercooled liquids or plastics. Nevertheless, for materials with one or two orders of magnitude smaller non linearities, still subsists the problem of directly measuring the relative contributions of electronic, nuclear or molecular reorientational origin. We present, here, the kinetics of the optical Kerr effect (OKE), taken on a subpicosecond time scale, in two materials which are of clear interest on this point of view.

© 1984 Optical Society of America