This beautiful light pattern is formed by the light of a laser beam after passing through a liquid crystal cell. The liquid crystal optical properties, such as the refractive index, are affected by the beam. In turn, they act on the propagation of light, inducing diffraction. Therefore light diffraction is "self-induced", and this optical phenomenon is a nonlinear one. The emerging light has a very wide divergence, so that, a few meters after the liquid crystal sample, this pattern may already have a radius as large as 2 or 3 meters.
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