Enhanced Electro-Optic Response Of Layered Composite Materials

Abstract

electro-optic effect was measured to have the value x (3) 5(3.210.2i)310 221 625% (m/V) 2 . The real part of this value is a factor of 3.2 650% times larger than that of the doped polycarbonate, which is the dominant electro-optic component of the composite. We have modeled the experiment by using both effective medium theory and by solving the wave equation for our multilayered system, and we find that these approaches give consistent predictions which are in good agreement to the experimental results. © 1999 American Institute of Physics.@S0003-6951~99!03117-4# Many applications in modern optical technology require the use of materials with a large electro-optic response. Examples include the photonic control of phased array radar, 1 satellite-to-satellite data links that will require data transfer rates during the next decade of 50‐100 Gbits/s, 2 and optical fiber links of 1 Tbit/s. 3 The present approaches to improving materials ~e.g., improved organic chromophore design! have resulted in characteristics that are within a small factor of being satisfactory for application. Therefore, new approaches are in order and in this letter, we describe a technique that can be used to increase the value of essentially any electrooptic material by forming a composite out of that material. In the present work, we deal with the quadratic electro-optic effect, although the technique can be applied to the linear electro-optic effect as well. Our approach entails forming a composite material consisting of alternating layers of an electro-optic material ~designated material a in the ensuing analysis! and a buffer material ~designated material b! having a different linear dielectric constant. A theoretical analysis 4 of such a situation shows that the effective nonlinear susceptibility describing the quadratic electro-optic effect x ijkl (v8;v,V1 ,V2) is related