Owing to the nonlinear effect of optical field-induced director reorientation, self-focusing of an optical beam can occur in nematic liquid crystals and an almost diffraction-compensated propagation can be observed with milliwatts of light power and propagation lengths of several millimeters. This opens the way for applications in all-optical signal handling and reconfigurable optical interconnections. Self-focusing of an optical beam in nematic liquid-crystal cells has been studied experimentally and by means of numerical simulation. The relationships between bias voltage, cell thickness and required optical power have been examined, thus allowing the determination of the most favorable conditions for soliton-like beam propagation.

Using phase-measurement interferometry, we observe the waveguide induced by a solitonlike optical beam sustained by the molecular reorientation-induced optical nonlinearity of a nematic liquid crystal in planar configuration. Our purpose in the study is to characterize the nonlocality of the optical response of nematic liquid crystals. A good agreement is obtained between the experiment and a full ͑2+1͒-dimensional numerical simulation of the nonlinear optical beam propagation in the cell.

No abstract

No abstract