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Journal of the Optical Society of America B

High-efficiency energy transfer due to stimulated orientational scattering of light in nematic liquid crystals

Nelson V. Tabiryan, Andrey V. Sukhov, Boris Ya Zel'dovich

Published Aug 1, 2001• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The saturation stage of stimulated orientational scattering (SOS) of light in thick planarly aligned nematic-liquid-crystal layers was observed and studied experimentally. The power efficiency of o-wave pump conversion exceeded 90%. Both saturation of transmitted pump power and cascading of SOS were observed. The latter indicated that, for higher than ∼50% conversion efficiencies, inverse conversion of the scattered e-polarized signal into wide-angle speckle, o-polarized background started to take place, leading to partial depletion of the primarily scattered e wave. Results were in good qualitative agreement with conventional SOS theory.

DOI
10.1364/josab.18.001203

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The saturation stage of stimulated orientational scattering (SOS) of light in thick planarly aligned nematic-liquid-crystal layers was observed and studied experimentally. The power efficiency of o-wave pump conversion exceeded 90%. Both saturation of transmitted pump power and cascading of SOS were observed. The latter indicated that, for higher than ∼50% conversion efficiencies, inverse conversion of the scattered e-polarized signal into wide-angle speckle, o-polarized background started to take place, leading to partial depletion of the primarily scattered e wave. Results were in good qualitative agreement with conventional SOS theory.
The phenomenon of stimulated Rayleigh-wing scattering in anisotropic molecular liquids is analyzed. Representative combinations of polarization for the incident and scattered light are considered. It is shown that in regions where the focused laser beam is intense, saturation occurs in the molecular response to external optical fields, in that perfect alignment of the individual liquid molecules in the optical fields is approached. Accordingly, the nonlinear amplification associated with the stimulated radiation is reduced. The results of the analysis qualitatively explain several important recent observations which are in conflict with previous theroretical predictions. For example, it is shown that the nonlinear gain is considerably greater when the incident light is circularly polarized (the stimulated radiation being circularly polarized in the reverse sense) than it is when the incident light is linearly polarized. Despite saturation, sufficient amplification exists in the former case to allow the efficient conversion of incident to stimulated Rayleigh light at moderate power levels.
Coherent amplification was observed in an optical structure with multilayer C(60) doped nematic films, in which photorefractive gratings working in the Raman-Nath regime were created, leading to an asymmetric energy transfer in two-beam coupling. This multilayer optical structure exhibited exponential dependence of the signal gain on the number of nematic layers when higher-order diffractions were negligibly small. A gain of the 0.1 microW signal as high as approximately 4000 was achieved in the six-layer sample at a low dc voltage of 1.2 V and a low pump beam power of 8 mW. The gain of this ultrahigh sensitive six-layer sample depended strongly on the pump to signal beam power ratio as well as the power of the signal.
Sufficiently strong scattering can cause light propagation to stop, not due to absorption, but due to interference effects, thus localizing light. Efforts to observe localization in three dimensions with visible light have focused on high-scattering-disordered nanometer-sized powders with the unwanted side effect of strong absorption. The strong absorption mimics the signature of localization---exponential decay of transmitted intensity---complicating the interpretation of results. Nematic liquid crystals are more effective at scattering light and can have low absorption. We report experimental observation of strong photon localization in a nematic liquid crystal in which the effects of absorption are minimal.