OPTICALLY INDUCED HYDRODYNAMIC REORIENTATION OF LIQUID-CRYSTALS AND ITS APPLICATIONS FOR INFRARED DETECTION AND INFORMATION-STORAGE

Absorption mediated effects provide the strongest mechanisms of optica lly induced reorientation of liquid crystals (LC's). The following mec hanism of transformation of absorbed light energy into reorientation o f LC's is theoretically discussed in the present paper: thermal expans ion resulting from absorption induced heating causes inhomogeneous flo w of the LC in the capillary which, due to the strong coupling of hydr odynamic and orientational degrees of freedom, leads to LC reorientati on. With a plane capillary, this may allow detection of infrared radia tion at a microwatt level. With microcapillaries in porous media, this may lead to chaotization of orientation and creation of scattering pi xels allowing for high resolution optical information storage matrixes . Estimations done for so called ''filled nematic liquid crystals'' ar e in good accordance with existing experimental data.