Design and synthesis of chromophores with enhanced electro-optic activities in both bulk and plasmonic-organic hybrid devices

This study demonstrates enhancement of in-device electro-optic activity via a series of theory-inspired organic electro-optic (OEO) chromophores based on strong (diarylamino)phenyl electron donating moieties. These chromophores are tuned to minimize trade-offs between molecular hyperpolarizability and optical loss. Hyper-Rayleigh scattering (HRS) measurements demonstrate that these chromophores, herein described as BAH, show >2-fold improvement in beta versus standard chromophores such as JRD1, and approach that of the recent BTP and BAY chromophore families. Electric field poled bulk devices of neat and binary BAH chromophores exhibited significantly enhanced EO coefficients (r(33)) and poling efficiencies (r(33)/E-p) compared with state-of-the-art chromophores such as JRD1. The neat BAH13 devices with charge blocking layers produced very large poling efficiencies of 11.6 +/- 0.7 nm(2) V-2 and maximum r(33) value of 1100 +/- 100 pm V-1 at 1310 nm on hafnium dioxide (HfO2). These results were comparable to that of our recently reported BAY1 but with much lower loss (extinction coefficient, k), and greatly exceeding that of other previously reported OEO compounds. 3 : 1 BAH-FD : BAH13 blends showed a poling efficiency of 6.7 +/- 0.3 nm(2) V-2 and an even greater reduction in k. 1 : 1 BAH-BB : BAH13 showed a higher poling efficiency of 8.4 +/- 0.3 nm(2) V-2, which is approximately a 2.5-fold enhancement in poling efficiency vs. JRD1. Neat BAH13 was evaluated in plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) Mach-Zehnder modulators with a phase shifter length of 10 mu m and slot widths of 80 and 105 nm. In-device BAH13 achieved a maximum r(33) of 208 pm V-1 at 1550 nm, which is similar to 1.7 times higher than JRD1 under equivalent conditions.

Automated summary

This study demonstrates the enhancement of in-device electro-optic activity by utilizing theory-inspired organic electro-optic chromophores, showing significant improvement in optical properties and electro-optic coefficients compared to current state-of-the-art chromophores. The results suggest potential for practical applications in advanced electro-optic devices.