Polymeric materials for optics - Properties and applications

Optics professionals often prognosticate that optics will be to the 21st century what electronics was to the last. This challenge is driven by the unprecedented development of new technologies using new materials with original and often multiple properties (smart materials). Organic materials, and in particular polymers specially functionalized for the applications in question, are playing an ever-increasing role in this development. In addition to their low cost, these materials have two particularly important advantages over inorganic materials. Firstly, as organic components, their properties are directly linked to the specific characteristics of the repeating elementary units forming their chains, as well as any molecules incorporated into the material. It is therefore possible to endow polymers with specific properties by introducing into these materials (by doping or grafting) molecules possessing particular properties adapted to the targeted functionalities. On the other hand, the ability to model and predict the properties of molecular components fairly accurately is a decisive advantage in the search for new high-performance materials. It's easy to see why the fantastic progress made in organic chemistry, capable of synthesizing original molecules with specific properties and then assembling them into chains, has accompanied the development of polymer materials for numerous applications.

In the field of optics, the use of materials formed from functionalized polymers is relatively recent, but rapidly expanding. These polymers are the subject of a great deal of research, because in addition to the numerous advantages already mentioned, some of their performances can now match or even surpass those of more traditional inorganic materials. In the consumer eyewear sector, for example, organic materials have continued to develop, gradually replacing mineral materials and accounting for the majority of lenses sold in industrialized countries. In the telecommunications field, where inorganic materials are still largely dominant, organics are becoming very promising candidates for specific applications, where their very strong interaction with light (high absorption cross-sections, high luminescence efficiencies, tunability over a wide spectral band) and ultra-fast, non-linear optical responses can be decisive parameters. The ever-increasing optimization of the functional molecular motifs that make up polymers, and the possibility of controlling and modulating their properties on a submicron scale, open up particularly exciting prospects for the manufacture of passive and active devices for integrated optics and, more broadly, for organic photonics. Advances in organic semiconducting conjugated polymers have given rise to a veritable organic optoelectronics field, whose many applications...