Abstract

Development for the materials with a large optical nonlinearity has been of a great interest because it will promise the key techniques to realize the future photonics such as all optical data processing and communication. Although the organic materials possess a great advantage with a large susceptibility compared with the inorganics, nonlinear susceptibility from these reported so far was two or three orders of magnitude less than the criterion for a practical use. So the new technique to control and enhance the optical nonlinearity is significantly important to overcome the above obstacles. One of the most hopeful techniques to modulate and enhance the optical nonlinearity of organic materials is to exploit the excited states by optical pumping.^1-4 In the present paper, one-dimensional conjugated polymer that exhibits a large optical nonlinearity in the ground state is targeted as a new system for the optical pumping enhancement of third order optical nonlinearity. Femtosecond optical pumping of conjugated polymer was revealed to produce a tremendous gain of the third order nonlinearity.

© 1996 Optical Society of America