Second-harmonic generation in conjugated polymer films: A sensitive probe of how bulk polymer crystallinity changes with spin speed

In this paper, we examine the second-harmonic generation (SHG) from spin-cast films of the conjugated polymer poly(2-methoxy-5-(2'-ethylhexyloxy)para-phenylenevinylene) (MEH-PPV). We find that the SHG intensity depends strongly on the speed used to spin cast the films. Two-dimensional grazing incidence x-ray diffraction (XRD) experiments show that the bulk crystallinity of the MEH-PPV films varies in the same way with spin speed as the SHG intensity. This strongly suggests that instead of being interface specific, the second-harmonic signal from conjugated polymer films is dominated by the crystalline domains in the bulk. The nonmonotonic dependence of both the SHG intensity and the degree of MEH-PPV crystallinity results from a competition between the shear forces and the solvent evaporation rate during spin coating, which produces a maximum degree of crystallinity for MEH-PPV films spin cast at around 1400 rpm. We also use XRD to show that thermal annealing produces MEH-PPV films with a single degree of bulk crystallinity, independent of how they were originally cast. This allows us to model the angle- and thickness-dependent SHG from annealed MEH-PPV films with a single polarizability tensor. We find that the SHG from MEH-PPV films fits best to a bulk-allowed electric quadrupole mechanism, consistent with the bulk SHG seen in other pi-stacked aromatic molecules. Thus, rather than providing information about conjugated polymer interfaces, SHG can be used as a sensitive probe of the local degree of crystallinity in the bulk of conjugated polymer films. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3436517]