New organometallic materials for nonlinear optics: Metal sigma-arylacetylides

Hyper-Rayleigh scattering is used to investigate the nonlinear optical properties of novel organometallic compounds. For a series of ruthenium and gold sigma-arylacetylides, including some bimetallic complexes, the influence of the organometallic donor group, chain length and type of acceptor on the quadratic hyperpolarizability is studied. The hyperpolarizabilities found are among the highest (10(-27) esu) known for organometallic compounds. Moreover, electric-field induced second-harmonic generation confirms these values and indicates that only one major tensor component is present.