Abstract
The mechanism of the optical Kerr effect of liquid crystalline systems is yet to be clarified because of the difficulty in extracting the purely optical effect from the observed signals in experiment, which is affected by various other effects. In order to analyze the optical Kerr effect of liquid crystals at molecular level, we performed molecular dynamics simulations using the Gay-Berne model. We found, in particular, that them is a component of the optical response function that does not vanish at long times for the nematic phase. The origin of the optical response is discussed in terms of the orientational and collision-induced fluctuations of polarizability.
