Enhanced Optical Limiting Thin Films by Jet Vapor Deposition

Reverse saturable absorbers (RSAs) are optically nonlinear materials that show increasingly high absorption at higher light intensities, and are thus excellent candidate materials for making optical limiters. However, the highest optical nonlinearities of the currently known RSAs are at least two orders of magnitude too low to be practically useful. The focus of our Phase I project is to use Jet Vapor Deposition (JVD), a novel, versatile, and powerful vapor deposition technology, to fabricate RSA thin films with significantly enhanced optical nonlinearity, exploring various photophysical, photochemical, and nonlinear optical mechanisms, Broadband optical limiting will be realized by combining a number of RSAs with enhanced nonlinearities in difference spectral regions into a single film. For practical applications, JVD optical limiting films may be directly applied to optical elements such as window and lenses, or optical instruments such as goggles and light sensors. JVD is a high rate, low cost, pollution-free process ready for high volume production on a commercial scale.