Recent Progress of Electro-optic Polymers for Device Applications

Electro-optic (E-O) polymers have drawn great interests in recent years because of their potential applications in photonics devices such as electro-optic modulators and switches, optical data storage and information processing1-2. Recent interests have been focused on the design and development of polymeric material systems (active and passive) with large E-O coefficients and high thermal, temporal, chemical and phtochemical stability3-8. The E-O response of a active polymer commonly arises from the electric field induced alignment of its second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) chromophore, either doped as a guest/host system or covalently bonded as a side-chain. Because of the strong interaction among the electric dipoles, the poled structure is in a meta-stable state; the poled NLO chromophores which possess large dipole moment will tend to relax back to the randomly oriented state. As a result, the stability of the poled structure strongly depends on the rigidity of the overall material system. This paper provides a brief review of the latest developments of highly efficient and thermally stable chromophores and polymers for device applications.