Properties Of Polyenic Langmuir Blodgett Films

Novel conjugated nonlinear optical polyene molecules, having donor and acceptor substituents and being designed so as to be suitable for Langmuir Blodgett deposition have been synthesised, deposited and characterised. Alternating Y-type multilayer structures have been fabricated, and their nonlinear optical properties have been studied by second harmonic generation experiments. The dependence of the observed second harmonic signal on film thickness and on deposition conditions will be described. The magnitude of the nonlinear optical coefficients obtained from the best films exceeds that of other systems reported in the literature.