Light-induced multistability and Freedericksz transition in nematic liquid crystals

Abstract

We study light transmission through a homeotropically oriented nematic liquid crystal cell and solve self-consistently a nonlinear equation for the nematic director coupled to Maxwell's equations. We demonstrate that above a certain threshold of the input light intensity, the liquid-crystal cell changes abruptly its optical properties due to the light-induced Freedericksz transition, demonstrating multistable hysteresis-like dependencies in the transmission. We suggest that these properties can be employed for tunable all-optical switching photonic devices based on liquid crystals.