The quadratic electro-optical effect in ferroelectric liquid crystal helical nanostructures: role of cell thickness and voltage frequency

ABSTRACT

It was reliably proved in recent years both theoretically and experimentally that the electrically controlled birefringence of chiral smectic C* phase with subwavelength helix pitch is proportional to the square of the electric field E. The goal of the present work is to investigate the restrictions of the quadratic effect imposed by the thickness of the smectic C* layer between two solid substrates, and by the frequency of applied voltage. It is shown that these restrictions are mainly associated with the dielectric dispersion of the Goldstone mode under various boundary conditions.

Graphical Abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC)
• helix pitch
• deformed helix ferroelectric (DHF)
• polarised light
• ellipticity
• electrically controlled birefringence

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to E. Miraldi for optic set-up alignment. One of the authors (S. Torgova) acknowledges the support by Politecnico di Torino.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by RFBR projects №13-02-00598 and №13-02-90487 Ukr_f_а and by the grant from the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences: ‘Development of physical principles for creating a new generation of nanophotonic elements based on hybrid structures with a silicon control circuit and a ferroelectric liquid crystal’.