2a06 Numerical Study of the Birefringence of Liquid Crystals doped with Metallic Nanostructures

Abstract

We present a method to enhance the birefringence of liquid crystals (LC) by doping anisotropic metallic nano-rods. The nano-rods were assumed to align in the same direction as the LC molecules. We calculated the effective refractive index of nano-rod doped LCs from the reflection and transmission coefficients. At 5000 nm, the effective ordinary and extraordinary refractive indices were n_o = 1.55 and n_e = 1.85, respectively, resulting in a 50% increase in birefringence from the non-doped value of 0.2.