Induced Magnetic Anisotropy in Liquid Crystals Doped with Resonant Semiconductor Nanoparticles

Currently, there are many efforts to improve the electrooptical properties of liquid crystals by means of doping them with different types of nanoparticles. In addition, liquid crystals may be used as active media to dynamically control other interesting phenomena, such as light scattering resonances. In this sense, mixtures of resonant nanoparticles hosted in a liquid crystal could be a potential metamaterial with interesting properties. In this work, the artificial magnetism induced in a mixture of semiconductor nanoparticles surrounded by a liquid crystal is analyzed. Effective magnetic permeability of mixtures has been obtained using the Maxwell-Garnett effective medium theory. Furthermore, permeability variations with nanoparticles size and their concentration in the liquid crystal, as well as the magnetic anisotropy, have been studied.This work has been supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain (Grants nos. TEC2013-47342-C2-2-R, TEC2012-38901-C02-01, and TEC2013-50138-EXP) and the R&D Program SINFOTON S2013/MIT-2790 of the Comunidad de Madrid. Vicente Marzal acknowledges the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad for FPI grant