Birefringence improvement in azopolymer doped with MFI zeolite nanoparticles

Dimana Nazarova (1) , Lian Nedelchev (1) , Svetlana Mintova (2)

1 Institute of Optical Materials and Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
2 LCS - Laboratoire catalyse et spectrochimie

Hybrid organic/inorganic materials based oncombination of polymers and inorganic nanoparticles(NP) attract considerable attention due to their advan-tageous electrical, optical, or mechanical properties. Re-cently it was reported that doping photopolymers withnanoparticles allows to achieve near 100% net diffractionefficiency in case of conventional holographic recording.Thus, we have synthesized novel organic/inorganic com-posite materials by incorporating MFI (Mordenite Frame-work Inverted) type zeolite nanoparticles in an amorphousside-chain azopolymer. A considerable improvement ofthe photoresponse in thin films of these composite mate-rials has been observed compared to the non-doped sam-ples – nearly 25% increase of the saturated value of thebirefringence. Moreover the photoinduced birefringence isstable in time which allows these materials to be used asmedia for diffractive optical elements with high efficiencyand unique polarization properties.

Mots clés: Azobenzene polymer; MFI zeolite nanopar-ticles; Nanocomposite materials; Photoinduced birefrin-gence; Polarimetric measurement

Domaines: Chimie

Dimana Nazarova, Lian Nedelchev, Svetlana Mintova. Birefringence improvement in azopolymer doped with MFI zeolite nanoparticles. Optofluidics, Microfluidics and Nanofluidics, 2014, 1 (number of volumes: 1), pp.43--48. ⟨10.2478/optof-2014-0005⟩. ⟨hal-01840262⟩