Existence of a Critical Tilt Angle for the Optical Properties of Chiral Smectic Liquid Crystals

Abstract

The optical properties of single-domain chiral smectic liquid crystals have been theoretically studied as a function of the tilt angle. It is shown that structures with a particular value ${\theta }_{\mathrm{rev}}$ of the tilt angle, which depends only on the principal values of the local dielectric tensor, have very peculiar behavior. In passage through ${\theta }_{\mathrm{rev}}$ a reversal of the polarization states of the eigenfunctions and a drastic change of many optical properties occur.