| Abstract
| - Optical switching behavior of low-molecular-weight and polymerazobenzene liquid crystals (LCs) wasexplored by means of reflection-mode analysis. Reflectivitychanged on pulse irradiation under various conditionsof orientations of LC molecules with respect to incident probe light,either s-polarization or p-polarization. For thelow-molecular-weight LCs, we obtained a response time of 100 μs,which was very similar to that observed in thetransmission-mode analysis, while we observed a decay time of 1 ms,which was significantly shorter than thatobserved in the transmission-mode analysis. The fast decay may bedue to diffusion and reorientation processeswhich are characteristic of the reflection-mode analysis. For thepolymer LCs, we observed a much slower decaythan those for the low-molecular-weight LCs.
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