Recently, advanced photonic devices have been fabricated in the laboratory
and are becoming commercially available. Thus, there is considerable
interest in inexpensive but efficient non-linear optical (NLO) materials
that are simple to make and work with. In the last three years a large
number of publications and patents have appeared describing NLO properties
of organic materials, usually dyes, incorporated into or synthetically
attached to polymers [1]. Such materials must be oriented before they have
second-order NLO activity. Two methods have been used. In one, contact
poling [2–5], two electrodes are formed on or in the material and an
electric field is placed between them. In the other, corona poling, a
discharge deposits charge on the polymer, which creates a strong orienting
field [6–8]. One could generalize that contact poling is (more) difficult to
do, but the results are easy to understand, while corona poling is simple to
do, but the results are (more) difficult to understand. This paper describes
a set of corona poling experiments.
Generalizing the correlated chromophore domain model of reversible photodegradation to include the effects of an applied electric field