Temperature effect on the refractive indices and Kerr constant of doped nematic liquid crystals with right-handed dopants

Liquid crystals with high optical and electro-optical responses play an important role in optics and photonics. Therefore, providing a simple method to increase the optical behavior of liquid crystals under the influence of external fields can be considered one of the most challenging research areas. In this experimental work, the effects of temperature and right-handed chiral material with different weight percentages on the refractive indices and optical properties of E7 nematic liquid crystal under the influence of an external electric field were investigated. Despite the reduction of the Kerr constant with increasing the weight percentage of chiral dopants and temperature, the highest amount of optical response in the presence of the electric field was obtained for the nematic liquid crystal doped with 3% of right-handed material. In this case, the value of the Kerr constant is almost 2 times that of pure liquid crystal. This interesting result can be related to the order parameter changes caused by different molecular interactions. Thus, the results obtained in this research can be used as a simple method to increase the optical response of nematic liquid crystals in the presence of an external electric field.