Reflection and transmission of light in medium/cholesteric/substrate and glass (1)/cholesteric/glass (2) systems

Reflection and transmission of light in medium/cholesteric/substrate and glass (1)/cholesteric/glass (2) systems are discussed. These systems can be viewed as a cholesteric-filled Fabry-Perot resonator. A modified layer-addition method is used. Rigorous explicit expressions for the elements of the Jones matrices for these systems are derived. Reflection, transmission, Faraday-rotation, and polarization-ellipticity spectra were studied. The effect of quasi-monochromatism and degree of polarization of light on the refl ection properties was treated in terms of Müller matrices. The influence of the dielectric boundaries on intrinsic cholesteric polarizations was investigated. It is shown that initially quasi-circular intrinsic polarizations turn to quasi-linear as the difference between the cholesteric mean permittivity and the permittivity of the surrounding medium increases. Features of the Borrmann effect in the presence of dielectric boundaries are discussed.