Electronic electrooptic effects in ferroelectric liquid crystals.

摘要

There are a variety of potential applications in telecommunications and data processing for high-speed second-order nonlinear electronic electro-optic (EEO) switches in chip-based electronics. In these applications the ability to process optical materials and to integrate the electro-optical and electronic components are key issues that have led to the interest in and development of organic-based electro-optical materials. Ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) have potential because they are intrinsically polar by symmetry, a result of their tilted chiral smectic structure, which puts chiral molecules in a monoclinic environment. The directed design of FLCs for second order NLO and EEO applications has evolved a systematic increase in their performance in recent years with electrooptic coefficients, r ∼ 3 pm/V, demonstrated in EEO devices and d ∼ 20 pm/V in NLO applications. The integration of FLCs with silicon-based electronics is a proven commercial technology, but to apply FLCs for EEO it is clear that LC materials with larger second-order nonlinear coefficients (susceptibilities) must be developed. In this dissertation EEO characteristics of FLCs are explored. Including bent-core molecules and materials for potential telecommunication use, probing the modulation of the refractive index for lambda = 1310 nm light induced by applied radio frequency (RF) electric field.