Abstract
Self-starting optical phase conjugation is an interesting process which has good application potentials.1 Recently, we reported the observation of self-starting optical phase conjugation process in a nematic liquid crystal film.2 The optical nonlinearity employed there is the laser induced thermal index change. A main drawback of such stimulated thermal scattering effect is that it is quite sensitive to the temperature vicinity to Tc, the nematic-isotropic phase transition temperature. In this paper, we report the first observation, to our knowledge, of self-starting optical phase conjugation effect in nematic liquid crystal, using stimulated orientational scattering (SOS) effect3 induced by low power laser. The orientational fluctuations in nematics naturally provide an efficient energy coupling between the ordinary and the extraordinary waves (c.f. Fig. 1).
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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