Abstract

We investigated a series of donor-acceptor chromophores that show an extraordinarily large third-order optical nonlinearity compared to their molecular size [1]. With these compounds, we were able at the same time to approach the fundamental limit for the molecular third-order polarizability [2] within about an order of magnitude and to obtain very large specific third-order polarizabilities. The latter quantity is defined as the ratio between third-order polarizability and molecular mass. It is a quantitative measure of how the molecular nonlinearity can translate to a bulk-susceptibility in a dense single-component molecular assembly [1].

© 2007 IEEE