Abstract

All-optical, passive optical limiters normally rely on materials with nonlinear absorption and refraction.¹ The nonlinear material is critical to the operation of a limiter. Nonlinear micro- and nanolayer polymeric materials have been fabricated by using layer multiplying dies in a co-extrusion technique. The materials described here typically consist of 4096 layers with an average layer thickness on the order of 90 nm, or λ/4 in the visible although many other structures can be fabricated. Here we report nonlinear 1D layered materials that were fabricated by dispersing nonlinear dyes in alternate layers. These new materials have a modulation in the complex nonlinear refractive index in the direction normal to the surface of the layers. The magnitude of the nonlinear transmission in these materials depends both on the structure of the layers and on the photophysics of the nonlinear dyes in polymer hosts suitable for the multilayer extrusion process.

© 2002 Optical Society of America