Large deuterium isotope effect in the optical nonlinearity of dye-doped liquid crystals.
Deuterium-hydrogen isotopic substitution was found to approximately double the magnitude of the giant optical nonlinearity of dye-doped nematic liquid crystals arising from photoinduced molecular reorientation. In accordance with the predictions of our model, this doubling is well correlated with the increase in a characteristic decay time of the electronically excited dye anisotropy, as measured with time-resolved fluorescence. A similar isotopic effect is predicted for the optical Kerr nonlinearity of dyed isotropic liquids.
Kreuzer
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Darmstadt University of Technology, Institute of Applied Physics, Hochschulstrasse 6, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany.
Hanisch
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Eidenschink
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Paparo
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Marrucci
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