1.
Phys Rev Lett
; 88(1): 013902, 2002 Jan 07.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-11800945
ABSTRACT
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.