Nonlinear optical chromophores units

Considerable effort has been expended upon investigating the electronic absorption and fluorescence properties of carbazole derivatives or molecules containing a carbazole moiety/substructure, due to the interest of these compounds for application as nonlinear optical chromophores and as photoconducting materials. In the following, selection of papers is guided mainly by criteria of structural relevance, omitting very bulky molecules in which the carbazole unit is not prominent, or studies of luminescence properties. An overview of the electronic absorption spectra of carbazole derivatives is provided in Table 24. 

Optical properties of cyanines can be usefiil for both chiral substituents/environments and also third-order nonlinear optical properties in polymer films. Methine-chain substituted die arbo cyanines have been prepared from a chiral dialdehyde (S)-(+)-2-j -butylmalonaldehyde [127473-57-8] (79), where the chiral properties are introduced via the chiral j -butyl group on the central methine carbon of the pentamethine (die arbo cyanine) chromophore. For a nonchiral oxadicarbocyanine, the dimeric aggregate form of the dye shows circular dichroism when trapped in y-cyclodextrin (80). Attempts to prepare polymers with carbocyanine repeat units (linked by flexible chains) gave oligomers with only two or three repeat units (81). However, these materials... 

Ferrocene-containing polymers with long spacers have been prepared as new nonlinear optical (NLO) materials for second harmonic generation (SHG) applications (e. g. frequency doubling) [10], The use of ferrocene derivatives in this area is attractive as a result of their demonstrated large hyperpolarizability values combined with their thermal and photochemical stabilities [11], These factors make polyferrocenes desirable candidates for use as processable NLO materials. The polyurethane copolymer 4.4 was synthesized using a functional ferrocene monomer (Eq. 4.1) and has been well-characterized the molecular weight was estimated by GPC to be Mn=7600. The two possible orientations of the ferrocene NLO chromophore monomer unit, which correspond to opposite dipole orientations, were both present in the main chain. 

Two complementary amphiphilic polymers woe alternatively deposited by Y-type deposition. In Polymer A, the chromophore s electron accepting end is connected to a hydrophobic bridging unit, and its electron donating end is connected to a hydrophilic bridging unit The converse is true for Polymer B. These multilayer thin films have second order nonlinear optical properties which are stable at ambient temperature in the absence of oxygen. Microstructural information on a 92-bilayer polymer film was obtained fix)m polarized optical measurements. 

As pointed out already in Section 2.5.5, low-molecular weight ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) and FLCPs are attracting a lot of interest because of their potential for electro-optical applications. The polymers offer new possibilities, e.g., as elastomers for piezoelectric elements or by copolymerization [77, 78, 105] due to the formation of intrinsic mixtures between SmC mesogenic units and other comonomers. This leads to FLCPs combining several material properties which might be utilized for colored displays in the case of comonomers containing chromophores. For the differentiated evaluation of such copolymers with reference to the possible exploitation of nonlinear optical (NLO) properties, the interplay of the different orientation tendencies of the side-chain functionalities is of crucial importance [36,106]. 

The presence of only one Si(OR )3 unit per chromophore makes the formation of a highly crosslinked sol-gel network very difficult. The high mobility of the NLO dye in the free volume of the host network causes relaxation of the poling-induced order. Presently, the most promising approach to improve the stability of the second-order optical nonlinearity is therefore the use of multiple-substituted dyes, such as 2083. 

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