Functional waveguides, optically nonlinear

Functional Waveguides with Optically Nonlinear Organic Materials... 

In this chapter, the application of this technique to the thin film processing of electroactive polymers is discussed. The fabrication of controlled molecular assemblies of electroactive polymers provides a unique opportunity to investigate the structure-property and structure-function relationships of multilayer thin films containing electrically conductive, optically nonlinear and redox active polymers. These assemblies can also be coupled to appropriate solid supports for application in such molecular electronic devices as ultrathin electrodes and transistors, opticd waveguides and switches, and chemical and biochemical microelectronic sensors. 

Numerics has been used intensively in the field of integrated optics (10) since its early days, simply due to the fact that even the basic example of the slab waveguide requires the solution of a transcendental equation in order to calculate the propagation constants of the slab- guided modes. Of course, the focus was directed to analytical methods, primarily, as long as the power of a desktop computer did allow for a few coupled equations and special functions only e.g. to describe the nonlinear directional coupler in a coupled mode theory (CMT) picture. During the years, lots of analytic and semi-analytic approaches to solve the wave equation have been developed in order... 

All of the applications involving waveguides discussed in the previous section may be considered passive . The polymer serves some structural, protective, or guiding function but is not integral to the functioning of a device. A number of photonic device applications are available, however, where polymers may be useful as active elements. These applications require some type of nonlinear optical response when the material is irradiated with light of very high intensity, usually from a laser. 

The v cal integrated polymer device fabricated was a vartically stacked ED-polymer directional coupler (27). The nonlinear optical matmal used was a bisazo-dye functionalized EO polymer, 3RDCVXY. A standard REB process was used to fabricate the hybrid waveguides. Using die vertically stacked directional coupler, optical coupling similar to that of in-plane directional coupler was attained. 

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