Light-induced effects in liquid crystals: recent developments

In this paper we outline that light-induced effects in liquid crystals are still able to provide scientific and technological novelty in spite of a long time investigation started more than thirty years ago. Here we review some recent achievements related to new phenomena that have been studied in the past few years. In the first part of our report we discuss optical trapping of nematic colloids whose origin relies on the elastic properties of liquid crystals rather than on the field gradient that is on the basis of conventional optical tweezing. In the second part we present some recent results obtained in studying the self-phase modulation in bent core nematic liquid crystals, pointing out a peculiar two regimes behavior.