Abstract

Poly(p-phenylene benzobisthiazole) (PBT) has received a strong attention as a nonlinear optical (NLO) material because of its large, ultrafast NLO response¹ and inherently superior physical and chemical properties². However, the material is difficult to process into thin film with good optical quality, which hindered the detailed and accurate NLO studies. In order to improve optical quality, the PBT Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films were fabricated via a novel precursor route. The PBT LB films show not only improved optical quality but also highly in-plane oriented molecular packing. Because the π-electrons are delocalized along the polymer chain direction, the highly oriented packing of the polymer chains results in linear and NLO anisotropy properties. Therefore, in-plane anisotropy measurement of optical third-harmonic generation (THG) is one of the powerful tools to elucidate the packing arrangement in LB films of one-dimensional conjugated system.

© 1995 Optical Society of America