Optical Phase Conjugation and Wavefront Correction by Thin Nematic Liquid Crystal Cells

ABSTRACT

We report a study of optical phase conjugation in thin nematic cells by using low intensity of the incident beams and without any external applied field. The reported effect exploits the colossal optical nonlinearity recently observed in thin nematic liquid crystals films doped with a small amount of methyl red. The high conjugated reflectivity values obtained with the analysed samples, allows successful correction of severely aberrated wavefronts of very weak light beams.