Polymer Architectures for Optical and Photonic Applications

Abstract

The last decade of the last century is marked by a revolution in the synthesis of materials for optical and photonic applications, against the background of the growing need for new high-performance materials to increase the efficiency, reliability and speed of response linked to environmental aspects. The diversity of requirements and the optimization of the responses has led to a major dispute over the structure and composition of these materials: Inorganic or Organic, Natural or Synthetic, Hybrid or Pure, which has stimulated interest in the development of various architectures. Special attention shall be paid to establishing a fundamental relationship to correlate the non-linear optical response and chemical structure, especially for the category of organic materials- particularly polymers- distinguished by structural/compositional versatility and suitable for processing by simple technique which allows serial production. In fact, optical nonlinearity (NLO) is not an exotic phenomenon. Indeed, all materials are optically nonlinear if light is sufficiently intense. The synthesis of functional photonic organic materials is a major challenge of contemporary community of material scientists to imagine new functional materials based of” collective” phenomena by virtue of the “engineered” molecule- molecule interactions and spatial relationships. In this context, this paper aims to highlight the most important features concerning the structural - compositional relationship of polymeric materials used in optoelectronic and photonic applications.