부산대학교 도서관

Birefringence in polymers degrades the performance of optical devices. We focused on photoelastic birefringence, and proposed two methods of compensating for the birefringence - the random copolymerization method and the anisotropic molecule dopant method. We achieved the synthesis of a polymer whose photoelastic birefringence is approximately zero. Furthermore, we studied the birefringence of various acrylic polymers to analyze the effects of the structure of the side chain, and found out that the photoelastic coefficients of the acrylic polymers were different: some are positive and some are negative. That indicated that we could synthesize a polymer which has little birefringence by designing the structure of the side chain properly. Additionally, the measurement of orientational birefringence of PMMA and PEMA showed that the structure of the side chain had dissimilar impact on two types of birefringence.