Observation of Optical Bistability in Cholesteric Liquid Crystals

In the paper, some experimental and theoretical results concerning optical bistability in cholesteric liquid crystals are presented. A strong primary laser beam interacted nonlinearly with the material and influenced a second (probe) beam in such a way that its transmitted part exhibited a bistable dependence on the intensity of the first beam. It was observed that such a character may be attributed to the intensity of the outgoing probe wave. The obtained results reflect the symmetry of the sample and are interpreted as second order nonlinearity effects.