Homoclinic gluing bifurcations during the light induced reorientation in nematic-liquid-crystal films - art. no. 051701

An s-polarized laser beam that impinges at small incidence angle on a homeo tropically aligned nematic liquid crystal produces very interesting nonline ar phenomena. In this paper, we show that, due to the symmetry of the syste m, a cascade of successive homoclinic gluing bifurcations is responsible fo r the transition towards a stochastic regime in the experiment. We compare the experimental results with a model describing a sequence of gluing bifur cations.