Observation of the photorefractive effects in bent-core liquid crystals

We present a new observation of photorefractive (PR) effects in bent-core nematic (BCN) liquid crystal (LC) materials, where two kinds of optical-induced gratings are demonstrated and compared in pure and surface-doped BCN systems. The experimental results showed that these two kinds of gratings exhibit distinctive different polarization-dependent and angular-dependent behaviors, respectively. Furthermore, we supplied the pure and surface-doped rodlike LC systems for comparison, which revealed that V shape molecular structure of BCN can produce charge carrier more efficiently than rodlike molecular structure does. Thus BCN materials can offer an exciting potential for optical information processing.