Influence of material properties and particle geometry on the nonlinear optical performance of composite artificial Kerr materials.

Artificial Kerr materials consisting of suspended particles in a liquid host have been shown to exhibit nonlinear optical behavior.(1-4) If the suspended particles are spherical the suspension may display spatial variations in refractive index due to variations of the particle number density(1-3). It has been proposed(5) and demonstrated(4) that a suspension of anisotropic particles will exhibit birefringence due to alignment of the particles in an electric field. The latter effect is predicted to be faster than the former by a factor of order (Λ/a)2, where Λ is the grating period and a is the particle size.(5)