We apply scaling and the theory of the fundamental limits of the second-ordermolecular susceptibility to identify material classes with ultralargenonlinear-optical response. Size effects are removed by normalizing allnonlinearities to get intrinsic values so that the scaling behavior of a seriesof molecular homologues can be determined. Several new figures of merit areproposed that quantify the desirable properties for molecules that can bedesigned by adding a sequence of repeat units, and used in the assessment ofthe data. Three molecular classes are found. They are characterized bysub-scaling, nominal scaling, or super-scaling. Super-scaling homologues mostefficiently take advantage of increased size. We apply our approach to datacurrently available in the literature to identify the best super-scalingmolecular paradigms with the aim of identifying desirable traits of newmaterials.
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