Abstract

Thin films of conjugated polymers, as well as films with fullerene, C 60, embedded, are attracting a lot of attention because of their optical properties which allows them to be used as highly nonlinear optical waveguide for all-optical switching in advanced optical communication systems. This paper presents a radically new approach to creation of conjugated polymers and other elongated chemical structures (eg. carbon nanotubes, boron nitride tubest etc.) from the flux of molecules created by laser ablation. The approach is based on generation of a continuous flow of molecules with chemically active molecular bounds by means of a very high repetition rate (>10⁷ Hz) low energy picosecond pulse laser.

© 1996 Optical Society of America