Can all-optical switching go organic?

Science : In the past decade, there has been an explosion of academic and industrial interest in the use of organic conducting (“pi-conjugated”) materials in optoelectronics, flexible logic circuits, light emission, energy conversion, optical communications.Compared with inorganic materials, pi-conjugated materials can more easily be tuned through molecular design and cost less to manufacture.Advances in physical understanding, synthetic control of the chemical product, and computational molecular design now allow pi-conjugated materials to be tailored for a specific purpose or function. In Science, Joel M. Hales and associates report a promising new approach to the design of pi-conjugated materials for all-optical communications. Related link Design of polymethine dyes with large third-order optical nonlinearities and loss figures of merit