Abstract
Polymeric materials present certain advantages over inorganic crystals for second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) applications because of their low dielectric constant, large optical nonlinearity, low cost, and ease of processability. Stable NLO polymeric materials are potential candidates for electro-optic (EO) devices such as high bandwidth electro-optic modulators [1], optical interconnects [2], and fiber optic gyros [3]. Second-order NLO properties in polymers are present when the chromophores are aligned in a non-centrosymmetric manner. Chromophores with enhanced NLO susceptibilities can be obtained by increasing electron-donating and/or accepting effects [4], by extending the conjugation length between the donor and acceptor groups [5] and by replacing the phenyl moieties in the chromophores with thiophene moieties [6]. Efforts were made by our group [7] and various other groups [6, 8] to synthesize and optimize the properties of the chromophore functionalized polymers with high optical nonlinearity. Jen and coworkers synthesized a variety of thiophene based chromophores with high optical nonlinearity, 'μβ' [6, 8]. Many of these chromophores, when doped in a polymer matrix exhibited an electro-optic value greater than 20 pm/V. Marder and coworkers studied the effect of strong acceptors in NLO chromophores and have found that an 'r33' value of 55 pm/V at 1.313 μm is realizable with some of these chromophore doped polycarbonate composites. However, most of these systems are of guest-host type, which limit the chromophore solubility as well as temporal stability of the poled order in the NLO chromophore-polymer composites.
© 1997 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Alex K-Y. Jen and Ching-Fong Hsu
ThA2 Solid State Lasers: Materials and Applications (SSLMA) 1997
O.-K. Kim, A. Fort, M. Barzoukas, and J.-M. Lehn
FA.3 Organic Thin Films for Photonic Applications (OTF) 1997
I. Liakatas, C. Cai, M. Bösch, C. Fischer, M. Jäger, Ch. Bosshard, and F. Günter
CMI2 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 2000