Real Time Probes of Dye Doped Polymer Systems

Recently, advanced photonic devices have been fabricated in the laboratory and are becoming commercially available. Thus, there is considerable interest in inexpensive but efficient non-linear optical (NLO) materials that are simple to make and work with. In the last three years a large number of publications and patents have appeared describing NLO properties of organic materials, usually dyes, incorporated into or synthetically attached to polymers [1]. Such materials must be oriented before they have second-order NLO activity. Two methods have been used. In one, contact poling [2–5], two electrodes are formed on or in the material and an electric field is placed between them. In the other, corona poling, a discharge deposits charge on the polymer, which creates a strong orienting field [6–8]. One could generalize that contact poling is (more) difficult to do, but the results are easy to understand, while corona poling is simple to do, but the results are (more) difficult to understand. This paper describes a set of corona poling experiments.