Electrocontrol over Surface Plasmon Oscillations in a Homeotropic Nematic Liquid Crystal Cell
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15407/ujpe69.6.417Keywords:
nematic liquid crystal, orientational instability, hysteresis of orientational transition, director pretilt, anchoring energy, surface plasmon polaritonAbstract
The electric-field-induced orientational instability of the director in a cell of homeotropically oriented nematic liquid crystal (NLC) in the presence of a pretilt of the director on the substrate surface has been theoretically studied. It is found that the orientational transitions of the NLC director field from the initial homogeneous state to a significantly inhomogeneous one and the following transition into the planar state are induced by changes in the electric field strength and can be accompanied by hysteresis phenomena. The parameters of the latter are calculated, and conditions required for the hysteresis phenomena to exist, as well as their dependences on the NLC cell parameters, are determined. It is found that an increasing in the director pretilt at the substrate and/or the anchoring energy of the NLC with the inclined easy axis makes the hysteresis loop narrower, which may lead to the hysteresis disappearance in those orientational transitions. The propagation of the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) along the NLC cell surface in the case where one of the cell’s polymer substrates is covered on the outer side with a gold layer has also been investigated. The magnitude of the effective refractive index for the SPP is calculated, and it is found that its value decreases as the electric field strength increases. It is also found that the range of control over the SPP effective refractive index expands for smaller values of the tilt angle of the inclined easy axis and the polymer layer thickness, as well as for larger values of the SPP wavelength and the NLC optical anisotropy.
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