Electro-Optic Technology: Implications for Telecommunications, Computing, and Sensing

Time-dependent quantum/statistical mechanical computational methods are becoming increasingly important in guiding the development of soft matter materials relevant to energy, biomedical, computing, sensing, and information technologies, including materials formed by non-equilibrium processing.  We have employed such methods to guide the development of soft matter electro-optic materials prepared by electric field poling and have shown how specific non-covalent intermolecular electrostatic interactions can be introduced into materials to control molecular organization and lattice dimensionality.  The integration of new electro-optic materials into silicon photonic, plasmonic, and metamaterial device architectures is also discussed and demonstrated to yield performance records for electro-optic modulation, switching, and optical rectification.