Metal Containing Polymers for Optical Applications

Optical plastics or polymers with unique properties has become the new range of polymeric materials for various applications including optical applications.Polymers, as the base material for optical applications offer profound advantages over traditionally used inorganic glass materials .One of the most novel and never tried before approaches attempted in this work included the incorporation of metal atoms having low ionic radii and high polarizability into polymer materials to increase the refractive index and hardness of the optical materials based on polyacrylates. The present study thus, deals with the development of a process for the incorporation of metal atoms in such a way that it gives unique properties of tailor making of refractive index and Abbe number. Such metal containing polyacrylates have advantages over conventional materials which have a fixed refractive index and Abbe number. This novel concept of tailor making of optical properties, should be especially useful to professionals and researchers from the optical industry.