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Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Dynamics of the guest-host orientational interaction in dye-doped liquid-crystalline materials
Thai V Truong1, Lei Xu, Y R Shen
1Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Abstract:
We present a comprehensive study on the dynamics of laser-induced molecular reorientation in a dye-doped liquid crystalline (LC) medium that exhibits significant enhancement of the optical Kerr nonlinearity due to guest-host interaction. Using various techniques, we separately characterized the dynamical responses of the relevant molecular species present in the medium following photoexcitation and, thus, were able to follow the transient process in which photoexcitation of the dye molecules exert through guest-host interaction a net torque on the host LC material, leading to the observed enhanced optical Kerr nonlinearity. Experimental results agree quantitatively with the time-dependent theory based on a mean-field model of the guest-host interaction.
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