Press releases
Please quote Nature Materials as the source of these items.
November 2004
Looking inside nanowires
A molecular organic film has been developed that could provide a simple and inexpensive way to route information across optical fibre networks in a fraction of the normal time.
In the January issue of Nature Materials, Tobin Marks and colleagues describe the self-assembly of a film with both electrical and optical properties that allow a light signal to be switched between different paths without the normal bottleneck of having to convert it to an electrical signal first, thus significantly reducing the time for the signal to be processed.
Until now, most research into such 'electro-optic' materials - special because their refractive index changes under applied electric field - has focused on inorganic crystals such as lithium niobate, which are expensive and difficult to integrate with related technologies. In contrast, the organic materials developed by Marks et al. can be grown at low temperature onto almost any substrate and at little cost, allowing them to be easily integrated with optical waveguides and other device structures.
Very large electro-optic responses in H-bonded heteroaromatic films grown by physical vapour deposition pp910-917
Antonio Facchetti, Elisabetta Annoni, Luca Beverina, Marika Morone, Peiwang Zhu, Tobin J. Marks and Giorgio A. Pagani
Published online: 28 November 2004 | doi 10.1038/nmat1259
