Blue-sensitized nanoparticle-(thiol-ene) polymer composites for volume holographic recording

Abstract

We describe an experimental investigation of volume holographic recording in photopolymerizable thiol-ene based nanoparticle-polymer composites (NPCs) at a wavelength of 404 nm. We introduce a new photoinitiator, Irgacure819, for efficient volume holographic recording in the blue-violet spectral region and measure the photopolymerization dynamics and the holographic recording properties at its varying concentrations. It is found that doping of 0.1 wt.% Irgacure 819 provides the saturated refractive index modulation amplitude as large as 9.5×10−3 and the material recording sensitiviey as high as 1800 cm/J. These measured values are much larger than the minimum required values for holographic data storage media. It is also shown that the out-of-plane shrinkage can be suppressed more with decreasing the photoinitiator concentration. We compare these results with another blue sensitizer, Darocur TPO, to evaluate the performance of Irgacure 819.