Subnanowatt Opto-Molecular Generation of Localized Defects in Chiral Liquid Crystals

摘要

Liquid crystalline materials are well-known to exhibit various kinds of structural defects, whose space-variant optical properties are actually useful for a number of applications, including recently developed integrated optical vortex generators. Since topological defects cannot be transformed one to another by mere continuous changes of the material texture, these structures are highly relevant for information storage. An illustrative example is provided by frustrated chiral liquid crystals films, in which different localized metastable defect structures can be written by either structured or unstructured light beams. Such developments can be viewed as spatially controlled versions of randomly distributed defect structures generated by uniform quasistatic electric fields as shown in Refs. four decades ago, see also Ref. for more recent works.