Abstract

Water insoluble organic molecules that consist of both a hydrophilic group and a hydrophobic group, when situated at the air-water interface, tend to align themselves with the hydrophilic group anchored to the water substrate. If such molecules also contain a chromophore that exhibits large hyperpolarizabilities, their Langmuir monolayers usually possess macroscopic second-order optical nonlinearities. Out of such monolayers, multilayer Langmuir-Blodgett films for nonlinear optics can be built.¹ It is, therefore, of both fundamental and practical interest to investigate the influence of the molecular structure on the polar alignment in Langmuir monolayers.

© 1990 Optical Society of America