Abstract

A suite of polymer-ready nonlinear optical merocyanines has been synthesised and characterised. The tethering functionality—a vicinal dihydroxypropyl residue—is introduced onto the donor nitrogen of the chromophore precursor without the need for protection/deprotection steps, thereby giving ready access to potentially high T_g condensation polymer systems. An X-ray crystal structure determination on a representative chromophore 5 confirms the largely zwitterionic nature of these systems and experimental measurements of second-order nonlinear response [β(0)], by hyper-Raleigh scattering, indicate that a pyridylidene donor–quinomethide acceptor combination gives rise to the largest nonlinearity.