Abstract

A laser-induced liquid-crystal lens is formed by large optical nonlinearity and anisotropic complex refractive indices in guest-host liquid crystals. We obtained light wave propagation characteristics of the laser-induced LC lens. Three analysis methods were used to obtain light wave propagation characteristics. Analysis by 3-dimensional heat conduction was applied to determine the refractive index in the liquid-crystal layer. Another method used was to determine light wave propagation characteristics in the laser-induced lens by means of the finite-difference time domain (FDTD) method and diffraction theory. In this study, we draw a parallel between the experimental results and FDTD.