Abstract

There is much current interest in molecule-based nonlinear optical (NLO) materials because they offer attractions such as large nonresonant response, ultrafast response times, low dielectric constants/losses, intrinsic tailorability.^[1] Although considerable progress has been made in the fabrication of organic NLO materials in recent years, particularly in the areas of poled glassy polymers^[2,3] and Langmuir-Blodgett films^[4], significant synthetic challenges have impeded the realization of optimum materials.^[1,2] These challenges include maximizing chromophore hyperpolarizability and number density as well as maximizing the degree and thermal/temporal stability of induced microstructural acentricity. An attractive and intuitively superior alternative to the above approaches^[2-4] is a covalent self-assembly^[5] process in which acentric chromophoric superlattices^[6] are built up in a layer-by-layer fashion.^[6,7] We report here a new topotactic self-assembly approach to the preparation of robust chromophoric architectures with high structural regularity and large nonlinear optical response.

© 1995 Optical Society of America