FEATURES OF THE INFLUENCE OF NARROW LIGHT -BEAM ON A SMECTIC LIQUID-CRYSTAL

In a homeotropically oriented octyl-cyano-diphenyl smectic liquid crys tal there is observed a memory effect or the director field distortion s induced by a narrow light beam. Under a very narrow light beam of hi gh power density the distortion of smectic layers is found to occur in the region exceeding the sizes of the beam cross section by a factor of thousands. In addition, the picture of distortion has an axis symme try and righ character and contains various textures, including the po lygonal one and also the periodic layer modulation like Helfrich-Uro.