Printed second harmonic active organic nanofiber arrays

Organic nanofibers from semiconducting conjugated molecules are well suited to meet refined demands for advanced applications in future optoelectronics and nanophotonics. In contrast to their inorganic counterparts, the properties of organic nanowires can be tailored at the molecular level by chemical synthesis. Recently we have demonstrated the complete route from designing hyperpolarizabilities of individual molecules by chemically functionalizing para-quaterphenylene building blocks to the growth and optical characterization of nonlinear, optically active nanoaggregates. For that we have investigated nanofibers as grown via organic epitaxy. In the present work we show how chemically changing the functionalizing end groups leads to a huge increase of second order susceptibility, making the nanofibers technologically very interesting as efficient frequency doublers. For that the nanofibers have to be transferred either as individual entities or as ordered arrays onto specific target substrates. Here, we study the applicability of contact printing as a possible route to non-destructive nanofiber transfer.