Anisotropic medium, dielectric response

In this chapter, dielectric response of only isotropic medium is considered. However, in a local-order scale, such a medium is actually anisotropic. The anisotropy is characterized by a local axially symmetric potential. Spatial motion of a dipole in such a potential can be represented as a superposition of oscillations (librations) in a symmetry-axis plane and of a dipole s precession about this axis. In our theory this anisotropy is revealed as follows. The spectral function presents a linear combination of the transverse (K ) and the longitudinal (K ) spectral functions, which are found, respectively, for the parallel and the transverse orientations of the potential symmetry axis with... 

An applied electric field can be the electric held component of an electromagnetic wave, in which case electronic excitations or other optical responses may ensue. These are the topic of the next chapter. Here, the concern is with electrostatics, specihcally, the dielectric, or insulative, properties of materials. In an electrical conductor, an applied electric held, E, produces an electric current - ions, in the case of an ionic conductor, or electrons, in the case of an electronic conductor. Electrical conductivity has already been examined in earlier chapters. In insulating solids, the topic of the current discussion, the response to an applied electric held is a static spatial displacement of the bound ions or electrons, resulting in an electrical polarization, P, or net dipole moment (charge separahon) per unit volume, which is a vector quantity. In a homogeneous linear and isotropic medium, the polarization and electric held are aligned. In an anisotropic medium, this need not be so. The fth component of the polarization is related to the jth component of the electric held by ... 

The combination of molecular order and fluidity in a single phase results in several remarkable properties unique to liquid crystals. By now, it is quite evident that the constituent molecules of liquid crystal mesophases are structurally very anisotropic. Because of this shape anisotropy, all the molecular response functions, such as the electronic polarizability, are anisotropic. The long range order in the liquid-crystal phases prevents this molecular anisotropy from being completely averaged to zero, so that all the macroscopic response functions of the bulk material, such as the dielectric constant, are anisotropic as well. We have, therefore, a flexible fluid medium whose response to external perturbations is anisotropic. 

In much of the above analysis, the relative magnitude of the surface and bulk contribution to the nonlinear response has not been addressed in any detail. As noted in Section 3.1, in addition to the surface dipole terms of Eq. (3.9), there are also nonlocal electric-quadrupole-type nonlinearities arising from the bulk medium. The effective polarization is made of a combination of surface nonlinear polarization, PNS (2co) (Eq. (3.9)), and bulk nonlinear polarization (Eq. (3.8)) which contains bulk terms y and . The bulk term y is isotropic with respect to crystal rotation. Since it appears in linear combination with surface terms (e.g. Eq. (3.5)), its separate determination is not possible under most circumstances [83, 129, 130, 131]. It mimics a surface contribution but its magnitude depends only upon the dielectric properties of the bulk phases. For a nonlinear medium with a high index of refraction, this contribution is expected to be small since the ratio of the surface contribution to that from y is always larger than se2(2co)/y. The magnitude of the contribution from depends upon the orientation of the crystal and can be measured separately under conditions where the anisotropic contribution of vanishes. 

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