Magnetically induced transmission/absorption in chiral liquid crystals

Abstract

We report the discovery, theoretically, of new effects, namely, the effects of magnetically induced transparency/absorption. The effects are observed in a magnetically active helically structured periodical medium. Changing the external magnetic field and absorption, one can tune the frequency and the linewidth of the transparency/absorption band. We have shown that both effects can be simultaneously observed for two eigenmodes of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) layer. Both effects are nonreciprocal and tunable. They can be observed in the case of the absence of dispersion of the dielectric and the magnetic tensor components, as well as in the case of dispersion dependences of optical parameters of the CLC layer. Comparison of these effects show that while the effect of magnetically induced transparency is observed at wide intervals of variation of the parameters of the CLC layer, the effect of magnetically induced absorption can observe only in very small intervals of these parameters.