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

Abstract

We 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.