Abstract

When applying nonlinear optical organic materials to situations or devices where high aggregate bit rate optical pulse trains are used, care must be taken to separate the pure electronic optical effects from the thermo optic effects. In optical device applications, such as lightwave communication systems, pulse energies incident on the any nonlinear material are usually low. However, the high aggregate bit rates used in this type of application may result in a significant incident average power, possibly on the order of milliwatts. Therefore for situations where there is only a several nanosecond duration between incident pulses the induced optical nonlinearity consists of both electronic and thermal components. In this study, we carefully identify the two components contributing to the induced optical nonlinearities, discuss some limiting effects, as well as methods to reduce the importance of the thermo-optic effect. Two geometries are considered, namely an etalon and waveguide geometry.

© 1995 IEEE