Dynamics Of Photo-Induced Optical Nonlinearity Enhancement Of Azo-Benzene Doped Liquid Crystals

Optical nonlinearity of azo-benzene doped liquid crystals can be significantly enhanced not only in liquid crystal phase, but also in isotropic liquid phase. We investigated both experimentally and theoretically the ultrafast dynamics of the enhancement, which reveals that the enhancement mainly comes from losing of anisotropic distribution of trans azo-benzene isomers after they are resonantly excited by linearly polarized light.