Multimodal nonlinear optical polarizingmicroscopy of long-range orientational order in liquid crystals

Multimodal nonlinear optical polarizingmicroscopy of long-range orientational order in liquid crystals

Author(s): Ivan I. Smalyukh, Rahul P. Trivedi, Taewoo Lee, Univ. of Colorado atBoulder (United States)
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We demonstrate orientation-sensitive multimodal nonlinear optical polarizingmicroscopy capable of probing orientational, polar, and biaxial features ofmesomorphic ordering in soft matter systems such as liquid crystals. Thistechnique achieves simultaneous imaging in broadband coherent anti-Stokes Ramanscattering, multi-photon excitation fluorescence, and multi-harmonic generationpolarizing microscopy modes and is based on the use of a single femtosecondlaser and a photonic crystal fiber as sources of the probing light. Wedemonstrate the viability of this technique for mapping of 3D patterns ofmolecular orientations and show that images obtained in different microscopymodes are consistent with each other.