Organic electro-optic materials
L. R. Dalton
Department of Chemistry, University of Washington,
Seattle, WA 98195-1700, USA
Abstract: The macroscopic electrooptic activity of organic materials
depends upon the molecular hyperpolarizability, beta, of individual
organic chromophores and upon the product of number density, N,
and noncentrosymmetric order, <cos3theta>, of the chromophores
in a hardened polymer lattice. Quantum and statistical mechanical calculations
provide the basis for rational improvement of these parameters leading
to electro-optic coefficients (at telecommunication wavelengths) of
greater than 100 pm/V (a factor of 3 larger than values for the best
inorganic material, lithium niobate). Such calculations also provide
insight into what further improvements can be expected. Owing to low
and relatively dispersionless dielectric constants and refractive indicies,
organic materials facilitate the fabrication of devices with 3 dB operational
bandwidths of greater than 100 GHz. Moreover, robust and low optical
loss materials can be fabricated by design. An under-appreciated advantage
of organic electro-optic materials is their processability, and a variety
of stripline, cascaded prism and super-prism, and ring microresonator
devices are readily fabricated. Conformal, flexible, and three-dimensional
devices are also readily produced. With ring microresonator devices,
active wavelength division multiplexing, optical network reconfiguration,
and laser frequency tuning are straightforwardly accomplished.
*Lecture presented at the symposium "Polymers in electronics and photonics: Synthesis, characterizations and device applications", as part of the 39th IUPAC Congress and 86th Conference of the Canadian Society for Chemistry: Chemistry at the Interfaces, Ottawa, Canada, 10-15 August 2003. Other Congress presentations are published in this issue, pp. 1295-1603.
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