Pleochroism and Birefringence in Crystals

Optical Gyrotropy and Birefringence in Magnetic Crystals

Form birefringence in helical liquid crystals

The optical properties of cholesteric and chiral smectic liquid crystals are studied, in the limit of pitch smaller than the wavelength of visible light, by means of a formalism borrowing techniques developed to explain form birefringence effects in particulate media. The behaviour of actual stratified anisotropic substances is shown to be accurately approximated, in this limit, by an effective...

Optimal Control of Laser Induced Transient Birefringence in Liquid Crystals

Optimal control theory is applied to design a laser pulse to produce an anisotropic change of the refraction index in the vicinity of the isotropic-nematic phase transition in liquid crystals. The laser induced birefringence originates from the orientational anisotropy induced by the laser eld that is enhanced signiicantly due to the excluded volume eeect. The shape of the optimal pulse is anal...

High birefringence and low viscosity negative dielectric anisotropy liquid crystals

High birefringence and low viscosity negative dielectric anisotropy liquid crystals Sebastian Gauza a; Meizi Jiao a; Shin-Tson Wu a; Przemysaw Kula b; Roman Dbrowski b; Xiao Liang c a College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA b Institute of Chemistry, Military University of Technology, 00-908 Warsaw, Poland c Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua Univers...

Large birefringence in two-dimensional silicon photonic crystals

We report an experimental and theoretical study of the birefringence of two-dimensional photonic crystals in the spectral region below the first photonic band gap. Transmission spectroscopy is used to measure the birefringence of a sample composed of a triangular lattice of air cylinders in silicon, with a cylinder radius of 0.644 mm and a lattice pitch of 1.5 mm. The measured birefringence ~de...