Snell’s Law in Liquid Crystal Optics

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• Eric Stachura (Kennesaw State University)
• Friday 22 August 2025, 09:00-09:45
• Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.

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DNMW06 - Recent challenges in the mathematical design of new materials

Snell’s Law of geometric optics is a classical result which describes how light propagates when passing from one material to another. Similarly, Fermat’s principle says that light rays trace out paths which minimize a certain functional (optical path length). Both laws are well understood in classical materials (e.g. air, water, glass, etc.), both theoretically and experimentally. For more complex materials, such as liquid crystals, these laws remain important for understanding how light rays propagate through such a material and have recently appeared in studies involving optical interactions with topological solitons as well as Pancharatnam-Berry phase based lenses. I will discuss rigorous formulations of Snell’s Law in the context of liquid crystals (for instance, at the interface of a bi-axial nematic) and other general media such as metasurfaces. I will then discuss various challenges in this context as well as the utility of having such laws in hand mathematically, e.g. for applications to controlling light.

This talk is part of the Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series series.

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