Evaluation of Nonlinear Optical Host-Guest Systems with Long Lifetime

Abstract

Host-guest systems which consist of transparent polymer matrices and optical nonlinear active molecules, are one of the key materials for optical nonlinear devices. For practical use, the materials should have both large nonlinearity and long lifetime. Such host-guest systems, made of poly-acrylamide derivatives and p-nitroaniline, have been developed in the group of present authors1). The lifetimes at room temperature are expected to be more than several 10 years, as were estimated from the changes in nonlinear susceptibility over 180 days. Such a conventional evaluation might not be sufficiently accurate for long lifetime materials, because the lifetime is 10~1000 times longer than the ordinary available experimental period. In this paper we estimated the lifetime at room temperature from the Arrhenius plot based on the lifetime data at elevated temperature. This method seems to be more accurate and timesaving than the conventional one.