PA15 Optical Second Harmonic Generation of Liquid Crystal Infiltrated into Synthetic Opal

Abstract

Optical second harmonic generation (SHG) of nematic liquid crystals infiltrated into nano-scale void of synthetic opal has been studied. SHG was observed by irradiating laser beam into the opal infiltrated with nematic liquid crystal which is originally SHG-inactive. Opal has three-dimension array of nano size voids and it can be regarded as an assembly of many interfaces (condensed interfaces). It can be interpreted that the second-order nonlinear optical effect observed in this study is attributed to the inversion symmetry breaking at the condensed interfaces.