Abstract

Several techniques are in use for the characterization of the electrooptic properties of poled polymer thin films. Of these, three techniques - 1) extrapolation of electrooptic coefficient from second-harmonic generation data 2) attenuated total reflection (ATR)¹ and 3) ellipsometry²,³ - are favored for their convenience and accuracy. However, these methods are mainly used for material characterization and it is difficult to adopt them for measurements of the material nonlinearity in certain practical device structures such as those poled in-plane by coplanar electrodes. The new technique that we will present here - a two slit interference modulation measurement - is capable of measuring the electrooptic coefficient for both material and device characterization. Moreover, in this method, waveguiding is not required and both the real and the imaginary parts of either r₁₃ or r₃₃ coefficients can be measured independently.

© 1995 Optical Society of America