Novel Pulsed Plasma Treatment and Coating Process: Multilayer Structures for Optical Computing Applications.

摘要

The objective of this work has been to develop the technique and equipment required to use the STL pulsed plasma deposition process to produce amorphous multi-quantum well layered materials with layer thickness down to a few atoms. Such structures have many possible uses in defence-related areas, but at the request of SDI, work has concentrated on the use of the technique to produce non-linear optical materials with high third-order susceptibility for use in optical computing devices. In particular, films based on thin layers of chalcogenide glasses show large non-linear effects of similar magnitude to those seen in optical filters, and have demonstrated that it may be possible to construct very fast optical devices (<250 ps) using this technique. Furthermore, this technology should be readily integrated with passive optical components such as optical filters in order to produce all the necessary elements for a parallel computing system. Keywords: Multiquantum wells; Layer structures; Non-linear optical materials; Chalcogenide thin films; Optical computing; Optical filters; Pulsed plasma germanium sulphide. (jhd)