Controlled formation of Ag/poly(methyl-methacrylate) thin films by RAFT technique for optical switcher

The functional group of sulfur was introduced into the PMMA terminus by the reversible addition-fragmentation transfer (RAFT) technique and the PMMA/Ag nanocomposite film was prepared by the in situ synthetic method. The third-order nonlinear optical properties of the material were further investigated by the Z-scan technique. The result shows that the χ(3) nonlinearity of the material depend on the doped content of Ag nanoparticles and is obtained to be 6.22 × 10−9 esu at the content of 2.4 wt%. Furthermore, it is found that the material has the potential application on optical switcher at the content of 0.8 wt%.