Light-induced order modification – The way to speed up

Abstract Absorption of light by a molecule sitting in a liquid crystalline (LC) medium firstly affects the orientational ordering of its closest neighbours. A generalised Light-Induced Order Modification (LIOM) model has been developed that accounts for the changes of the refractive indices of a thin LC layer resulted from the light-stimulated modulation of the LC order parameter. The LIOM-mechanism explains experimentally observed large optical nonlinearities with extremely fast as for the LC system recording times. Due to the efficient local response a very high resolution has been achieved (