We study nonlinear performances of doped liquid crystals employing azo dye (DR1) and quantum dots. The nonlinear mechanisms include thermal effect, space-charge induced electric field, photo-isomerization, and optical-field induced molecular polarization. Our preliminary investigations reveal that these doped liquid crystals are dominated by different nonlinear mechanisms. In particular, we find that For dye-doped LC, the response time is generally robust to temperature variation but the diffraction efficiency is temperature-sensitive. Whereas, the QD-doped LC remains robust for both characteristics around room temperature. We also demonstrate dynamic holographic displays using these doped liquid crystals at a video rate of 60 Hz.
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