Material optimization for electro-optic modulation and cascading

摘要

A large effort has been devoted to the preparation of organic polymeric materials for electro-optic modulation and more recently fro cascading based processes. These materials contain push-pull chromophores either incorporated as guest in a high T_g polymeric matrix (doped polymers) or grafted onto the polymeric matrix. These systems present several advantages but requrie significant improvement at the molecular level - by designing optimized chromophores with very large molecular figure of merit specific to each application targeted. The sol-gel route was used to prepare hybrid organic-inorganic materials, for the fabrication of amorphous solids of various shapes (bulk, thin films...). The results obtained on optimized chromophore-doped poled thin films emphasize that intermolecular interactions have to be taken into account, as already pointed out by Dalton and coworkers.