Chalcogenide Hybrid Inorganic/Organic Polymers: Ultrahigh Refractive Index Polymers for Infrared Imaging

Laura E Anderson; Tristan S Kleine; Yueyan Zhang; David D Phan; Soha Namnabat; Edward A LaVilla; Katrina M Konopka; Lilliana Ruiz Diaz; Michael S Manchester; Jim Schwiegerling; Richard S Glass; Michael E Mackay; Kookheon Char; Robert A Norwood; Jeffrey Pyun

doi:10.1021/acsmacrolett.7b00225

Chalcogenide Hybrid Inorganic/Organic Polymers: Ultrahigh Refractive Index Polymers for Infrared Imaging

ACS Macro Lett. 2017 May 16;6(5):500-504. doi: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.7b00225. Epub 2017 Apr 14.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Arizona, 1306 East University Boulevard, Tucson, Arizona 85721, United States.
² Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware, 150 Academy Street, Newark, Delaware 19716, United States.
³ College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, United States.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Delaware, 201 Dupont Hall, Newark, Delaware 19716, United States.
⁵ School of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Program of Chemical Convergence of Energy and Environment, The National Creative Research Initiative Center for Intelligent Hybrids, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, Korea.

PMID: 35610885
DOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.7b00225

Abstract

We report on the preparation of ultrahigh refractive index polymers via the inverse vulcanization of elemental sulfur, selenium, and 1,3-diisopropenylbenzene for use as novel transmissive materials for mid-infrared (IR) imaging applications. Poly(sulfur-random-selenium-random-(1,3-diisopropenylbenzene)) (poly(S-r-Se-r-DIB) terpolymer materials from this process exhibit the highest refractive index of any synthetic polymer (n > 2.0) and excellent IR transparency, which can be directly tuned by terpolymer composition. Sulfur or selenium containing (co)polymers prepared via inverse vulcanization can be described as Chalcogenide Hybrid Inorganic/Organic Polymers (CHIPs) and are polymeric analogues to wholly inorganic Chalcogenide Glasses (ChGs), which are commonly used as transmissive materials in mid-IR imaging. Finally, we demonstrate that CHIPs composed of (poly(S-r-Se-r-DIB) can be melt processed into windows that enabled high quality mid-IR thermal imaging of human subjects and highly resolved imaging of human vasculature.