| The development of organic dyes tailored to have large third order nonlinearities has opened the way to the possibility of creating an all-optical switch provided that a bulk material of high optical quality can be made. We have developed a procedure to make dye-doped polymer which possesses both a large nonlinearity and a low optical loss. Furthermore, the polymeric material can be made into a polymer fiber. The core of an optical fiber is the ideal geometry in which to make use of these new dyes. This thesis reports on the fabrication and characterization of singlemode polymer optical fiber. Intensity dependent refractive index studies are used to decouple nonlinear mechanisms and show that the fast electronic response is large enough to make devices. |
