Abstract

Polymers, even with attached, non-centrosymmetric, side groups are amorphous due to the random orientation of the chromophores and therefore are not second-harmonic active. They can be made macroscopically non-centrosymmetric by applying strong electric fields (poling) near the glass temperature of the host polymer to align the side groups which normally have large dipole moments.[1] The side groups can be engineered to have large non-resonant nonlinearities so that the poled polymers can have d⁽²⁾s of the order of 50-100 pV/m.[1] This has made poled polymers interesting doubling media, especially in channel waveguides which can be easily fabricated using a number of polymer techniques. We have been exploring poled polymers for second harmonic generation (SHG) for operation with 1550 nm inputs for potential application to cascading, WDM frequency shifting, etc.[2,3] Here we report our progress using the modal dispersion phase-matching technique.

© 1997 Optical Society of America