Optical Properties And Potential Applications Of Azo Photosensitive Materials

In this thesis, we introduce the optical properties'of azo polymers (mainly the nonlinear optical properties),and potential applications. Nonlinear optics developed fastly after the advent of laser as an important branch of optics. The potential application of azo-dye is widely ranged, including:optical storage,optical communication,optical limiting,optical switches and so on.In the first half of the thesis, we simply introduced the nonlinear optical properties and application of organic polymers such as azo-dye containing materials, including: photo-induced birefringence,photoisomerizatio,photo-induced dichronic,photo-induced mass motion and surface gratings and optical activity effect. The applications focus on the development and principle of optical data storage and all-optical switching.Then, the left part of the thesis can be divided into three experiments. Experimental material is zao-dye Disperse Red 13 doped poly(methyl methacrylate)polymeric film. The first experiment:Nonlinear refraction in photo-induced anisotropic states of azo-dye containing materials. In this present experiment, the nonlinear refraction in photo-induced anisotropic states of azo-dye doped polymeric films is investigated. The second experiment: Incoherent dark spatial solitons and guiding white light in photosensitive polymeric materials. In this experiment, we study on the observation of incoherent planar dark solitons in bulk materials of Disperse Red 13-doped Poly(methyl methacrylate)(DR13/PMMA) by using photo-induced molecular reorientation. And after the soliton formation, the guiding of white light from an incandescent lamp was investigated for the first time. The last experiment: All-optical tunable transmission using azo-dye doping amorphous polymer film. In this experiment, we realized the tunable transmission of a 632.8nm probe beam with two kinds of methods. One is using the photo-induced thermal effect of pump light in our azo-dye containing sample, and the other way is to change the temperature of the sample directly. The first one realized an all-optical tunable transmission of the probe light. The other one we call temperature tunable transmission of the probe light.