Orientational optical nonlinearity of nematic liquid crystals integrated with THz metamaterials

Eleni Perivolari; Vassili A. Fedotov; Vasilis Apostolopoulos; Malgosia Kaczmarek

doi:10.1117/12.2594484

1 August 2021 Orientational optical nonlinearity of nematic liquid crystals integrated with THz metamaterials

Eleni Perivolari, Vassili A. Fedotov, Vasilis Apostolopoulos, Malgosia Kaczmarek

Proceedings Volume 11807, Liquid Crystals XXV; 118070C (2021) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2594484
Event: SPIE Organic Photonics + Electronics, 2021, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

We report on orientational, optical nonlinearity of nematic liquid crystals (NLCs), observed when integrated with THz metallic metamaterial (MM) resonators. Our findings show that the bulk NLCs orientation breaks down close to the MM-NLC interface. The THz MMs exhibit extreme electric field ‘hotspots’, when on resonance, that strongly alter the NLCs local orientation. We model numerically the distribution of the refractive index of NLCs molecules close to the MM interface which demonstrates that the resonantly induced electric fields of the MMs are able to drive the birefringence of the NLC device. We experimentally verified our theoretical predictions with THz-Time Domain Spectroscopy (THz-TDS) in the 0.1-1.4 THz range and showed that, even a relatively thin layer of NLCs (20μm) integrated with MMs, can manipulate long wavelengths (such as 300 μm), beyond the limitations imposed by the NLC anisotropy.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Eleni Perivolari, Vassili A. Fedotov, Vasilis Apostolopoulos, and Malgosia Kaczmarek "Orientational optical nonlinearity of nematic liquid crystals integrated with THz metamaterials", Proc. SPIE 11807, Liquid Crystals XXV, 118070C (1 August 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2594484

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