The basis of current optical computation involves nonlinear optical materials for optical switching, mass storage and other related functions. Current nonlinear optical (NLO) molecular materials, however, are relatively inefficient and subject to environmental and thermal degradation. Thus, new classes of highly efficient NLO materials are required in order to make feasible certain components of optical computation. In this application, recently discovered polyhedral-based NLO molecules are proposed as a new class of optical materials with potentially very high second-order response and significantly improved chemical and physical properties. These materials have several distinct advantages for NLO applications arising from their synthetic availability and accessibility, the diversity of available three-dimensional structures, the extreme chemical and thermal stability of the polyhedral units, the aromatic electronic nature of the polyhedra, their stability to photochemical and neutron irradiation, and the UV-visible and infra-red features of the polyhedral species.Anticipated Benefits/Commercial Applications: New NLO materials would find a significant number of direct commercial applications to areas such as frequency doubled lasers, video displays and optical computation-based markets.
