A 160-FEMTOSECOND OPTICAL-IMAGE PROCESSOR BASED ON A CONJUGATED POLYMER

Degenerate ground-state conjugated polymers exhibit large third-order nonlinear optical susceptibilities, including substantial two-photon a bsorption. With the use of a machine architecture suited to these mate rial properties, ultrafast optical processors are possible. A four-wav e mixing optical correlator was built with an air-stable, processable, degenerate ground-state conjugated polymer, poly(1,6-heptadiester). T he continuously updatable processor correlates two 5000-pixel images i n less than 160 femtoseconds, achieving peak processing rates of 3 x 1 0(16) operations per second.