The Orientational Optical Non – Linearity of Liquid Crystals

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Abstract
The cubic optical non-linearity of smectic liquid crystals (SLC) conditioned by director reorientation and layer structure deformation under the action of a light field is calculated. The strongest effects for smectic C phases are conditioned by the c-director turning without layer structure deformation. For smectic A phases, the director turning is accompanied by layer deformation, and because of the condition of layer incompressibility, the strongest response to the influence of the light field turns out to be non-local and its value depends on the cell thickness. Estimations of optical non-linearity constants have been made; ϵ2 ∼ 0.2 cm3/erg, for the light self-focusing and Xer ∼ 0.6 10−6 cm3/erg for the four-wave interaction; these are, respectively, 9 and 5 orders larger than the optical non-linearity for CS2.

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