Recent advances in monoclinic crystal optics

This article is mainly devoted to the modeling and measurement of the absorption and fluorescence angular distributions in polarized light of monoclinic crystals. Up to now theoretical crystal optics were mostly devoted to crystals having a high crystallographic symmetry. In these crystals belonging to the cubic, hexagonal, tetragonal, trigonal or orthorhombic lattice classes, the tensor properties related to the real part of the dielectric permittivity and to its imaginary part can be described in the same frame which orientation does not vary as a function of wavelength. The situation is much more complicated in the case of monoclinic crystals because it is necessary to define a specific frame for each property and each wavelength that are considered. The main features of monoclinic crystal optics are described in detail, followed by a review of monoclinic materials and the consequence of these features on their related optical properties.