[16p-422-1~11] 3.2 Equipment optics and materials

△ [16p-422-11] Photoresponsive behavior of polymer-stabilized dye-doped liquid crystals based on nonlinear optical effect

〇Koji Usui¹, Erika Katayama¹, Kyohei Hisano¹, Norihisa Akamatsu¹, Christopher Barrett^1,2, Atsushi Shishido^1,3 (1.Lab. for Chem. & Life Sci., Tokyo Tech., 2.McGill Univ., 3.PRESTO, JST)

Keywords:liquid crystal, polymer stabilization, nonlinear optical effect

In recent years, photoinduced reorientation of liquid crystals (LCs) have attracted much attention. Among them, dye-doped LCs have high optical nonlinearity. When a dye-doped LC is irradiated with linearly polarized light above the threshold intensity, the interaction between its optical electric field and polarization of excited dye molecules generates a torque to rotate the molecular director along the polarization direction. However, they require a high-intensity light source to induce molecular reorientation, which seriously limits the application. Recently, we have found that polymer-stabilized dye-doped LCs, containing low-concentration polymers in the dye-doped LCs, enhance the nonlinear optical property and allows the reduction of the threshold intensity. In this study, we focused on surface condition treated by silane coupler that induces the homeotropic alignment of LCs and investigated the photoresponsive behavior.