Non-local photo-polymerization kinetics including multiple termination mechanisms and dark reactions: Part III. Primary radical generation and inhibition

Photopolymers are playing an ever more important role in diverse areas of research such as holographic data storage, hybrid photonic circuits, and solitary waves. In each of these applications, the production of primary radicals is the driving force of the polymerization processes. Therefore an understanding of the production, removal, and scavenging processes of free radicals in a photopolymer system is crucial in determining a material's response to a given exposure. One such scavenging process is inhibition. In this paper the non-local photo-polymerization driven diffusion model is extended to more accurately model the effects of (i) time varying primary radical production, (ii) the rate of removal of photosensitizer, and (iii) inhibition. The model is presented to specifically analyze the effects of inhibition, which occur most predominantly at the start of grating growth, and comparisons between theory and experiment are performed which quantify these effects. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America