Abstract

Trans-β-Carotene shows one of the largest instantaneous off-resonant nonlinearities reported to date.¹ Increasing the electron conjugation with longer back bones, polymers, has been the most common approach to enhance such a nonlinear optical response². However it has been recognized that molecular asymmetrization represents another viable route for increasing the third order susceptibility without having to pay a price for smaller molecular densities, an increased molecular instability and poor solubility³. Here we report an enhancement of approximately a factor of 50.

© 1995 Optical Society of America