Abstract

One major goal of photonics is to manipulate optical signals directly, i.e. without converting a signal to the electronic domain. Keeping information in the optical domain preserves the very high bandwidths made possible by using a lightwave carrier and can significantly reduce cost and complexity of a system. To actively manipulate an optical signal requires photonic devices that incorporate some kind of usefully tunable optical nonlinearity. Recently there has been much renewed interest in using polymer materials with electro-optic (EO) optical nonlinearity to achieve this purpose. Among the reasons for this interest are: i.) advances in EO chromophore synthesis leading to large and stable EO coefficients [1], ii.) attractive dielectric and electrodynamic properties of many polymer materials [2], and iii.) possible compatibility with silicon processing.

© 2003 Optical Society of America