Slow and fast light in liquid crystal light valves.

We show that fast and slow light results from multiple scatterings in a liquid crystal light valve, where nondegenerate two-wave mixing occurs in the Raman-Nath regime of optical diffraction. The large nonlinear response and dispersive characteristics of the liquid crystals allow us to obtain group velocities as slow as less than 0.2 mm/s, which is attractive for the realization of ultrahigh precision interferometers and metrology measurements.

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