An interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) incorporating nonlinear optical (NLO) chromophores as a second-order NLO material isreported. This IPN system consists of an NLO active epoxy-based polymer network incorporating a thermally crosslinkable NLO chromophore, and an NLO active phenoxy-silicon polymer network. Characterization of the thermal and optical properties of the IPN samples are reported. The optical nonlinearity of the poled/cured IPN samples is stable after being heated at 100 °C for 168 h. The nonlinear optical coefficient, d 33 , of a poled/cured IPN sample is measured to be 32 pm/V at 1.064 µm. The electro-optic coefficients, r33, of this sample are determined to be 18 pm/V at 633 nm and 6.5 pm/V at 1.3 µm. Waveguide optical loss measurements have been carried out at 0.83 and 1.3 µm.Second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) materials are currently of interest to a large number of research groups as they can be used for a number of photonic applications, for example, doubled-frequency laser sources, electro-optic modulation, optical signal processing, optical interconnects, etc. A practical second-order NLO polymer should possess large second-order nonlinearity, excellent temporal stability at elevated temperatures, and low optical loss (1). A number of NLO polymers have been developed to exhibit large second-order NLO coefficients comparable to those of the inorganic NLO materials which are currently in use in devices (2,5). However, the major drawback of NLO polymers is the decay of their electric field induced secondorder optical nonlinearities. This decay is a result of the relaxation of the NLO chromophores from the induced noncentrosymmetric alignment to a random configuration. Numerous efforts have been made to minimize this decay through different approaches (4).Recently, we have reported on an approach to prepare stable second-order NLO polymers using a full interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) structure (5,6).
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