Abstract

Besides semiconductor materials and semiconductor-doped glasses, conjugated polymers are one of the promising candidates for the realisation of opto-optical switching-concepts based on nonresonant third order nonlinearities [1, 2, 3]. Polymeric materials offer many advantages in comparison to other materials including ease of device fabrication and tailoring their linear and nonlinear behavior by chemical synthesis. Thus, there is an almost infinite number of different structures. Therefore it is very important to have different methods to measure the nonlinear refractive index in polymer waveguides. Simple and quick methods to get a fast view about sign and magnitude and more complex methods to get a value as accurate as possible to be able to design nonlinear waveguide elements like nonlinear direction coupler, phase modulator, beamscanner or grating coupler. We realized different experimental set-ups for these measurements based on an Argon-pumped Ti-Sapphire laser working in the ps- and in the fs-regime.

© 1996 Optical Society of America