Abstract

Although it has been known for some time that organic materials can have large second and third order nonlinearities [1], it is only within the last five years that there has been a concentrated effort to try to make nonlinear devices out of them. This has been at least partly due to many misconceptions about organic materials which have been proven inaccurate. For example it was widely believed they have low damage thresholds, poor optical properties such as transmission, are not easily processible into device structures etc. In this paper we will review the linear and nonlinear properties of organic materials, how waveguides can and have been made out of them and some of the initial nonlinear devices which have reported.

© 1991 Optical Society of America