High Glass Transition Temperature Syndioregic Second Order Nonlinear Optical Polymers in Langmuir-Blodgett-Kuhn Films

Abstract

Recent progress has been made toward the goal of processing polymers at low temperature to produce all-polymeric nonlinear optical films which may ultimately find application as active waveguides. Our previously reported work [1] has utilized the Langmuir-Blodgett-Kuhn (LBK) technique to produce such films but the noncentrosymmetric order in those films was lost when heated above 80 °C. New polymers were designed to yield ordered films with higher thermal stability by eliminating the long alkyl side chains (Figure 1). The glass transition temperature (Tg) of the bulk polymer is about 240 °C, and the upper limit on short term thermal baking stability is about 320 °C [2].