Determination of the director profile in a nematic cell from guided wave data: an inverse problem

Abstract

Copyright © 2007 IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. This is the published version of an article published in New Journal of Physics Vol. 9, article 166. DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/9/6/166We consider an inverse problem: the estimation of the nematic director profile from experimental fully leaky guided mode data. This inverse problem is ill-posed in that small changes in the data may lead to large changes in the estimates of the director profile. The continuum equations for a nematic are exploited to stabilize the problem. We use experimental data drawn from a study of the dynamics of a hybrid-aligned nematic cell as an example