Influence of heating and dipping technique on the morphology and second-order nonlinear optical efficiency of anisotropic thin films

Summary form only given. Recently, we studied horizontally dipped Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films of a helicenebisquinone derivative. The molecules are organized into fibrous structures that are further organized into small domains (typically 50/spl times/100 nm). As a result the LB-films are anisotropic with a C/sub 2/-symmetry and a high nonlinear optical (NLO) response. Gidalevitz et al. (1998) recently demonstrated that melting can increase the order in anisotropic LB-films. Since, order is a very desirable feature in nonlinear optics, we studied the effect of heating on the NLO-efficiency of a LB film of the helicenebisquinone derivative. In addition, we studied the influence of the dipping technique. We used the horizontal and vertical dipping technique to construct 30-layer thick LB-films of a helicenebisquinone derivative.