International Journal of

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Layer-by-layer (LBL) electrostatic assembly of poly-electrolytes is proving to be an increasingly rich and versatile technique for the formation of multilayered thin films with a wide range of electrical, magnetic, and optical properties. In the present work we synthesized a new nonlinear optical (NLO) maleic acid copolymer containing Disperse Red 1 moieties, built-up multilayer assemblies by alternate adsorption of poly (allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH) and maleic copolymer derivative, and carried out an investigation on their second harmonic generation (SHG) properties. The resulting multilayer assemblies exhibit SHG which arises from the non-centrosymmetric alignment of the chromophore in the copolymer. The SHG signal increases with the number of chromophore-containing polymer layers, up to 5 layers. Further assembly reduces the signal

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We have studied light-induced birefringence (LIB) and surface relief grating (SRG) formation in the series of methylacrylate polymers. The effect of material structure such as length of photochromic side chain, glass transition temperature and molecular structure of azo units on LIB and SRG are studied. The optical formation of self-induced SRG on films of these materials is also presented.