Phase-matched third-harmonic generation via doubly resonant optical surface modes in 1D photonic crystals

Abstract

Efficient nonlinear conversion requires that interacting optical waves maintain a consistent phase relationship when traveling in a medium despite its dispersion. Birefringent phase-matching, which is often used to compensate for the dispersion, is not applicable to optically isotropic nonlinear materials. Here, we present a one-dimensional photonic crystal structure that allows the propagation of optical surface waves, both at the fundamental and third-harmonic frequencies, as an efficient medium for phase-matched third-harmonic generation. A unique advantage of this structure is that the effective refractive indices for the surface waves are similar to the refractive index of air at both frequencies. This allows phase-matching between the first and third harmonics, and a visible collinear beam of the third harmonic is produced at the prism-coupled output. Moreover, these optical surface waves propagate over long distances even if a lossy nonlinear nanofilm is deposited onto the photonic crystal surface. We provide experimental results for third-harmonic generation at a wavelength of 410 nm for a bare dielectric Ta2O5/SiO2 multilayer structure and for the same structure coated with a 15-nm GaAs film.

Coherent power amplification of third-order harmonic femtosecond pulses at thin-film up-conversion nanoparticles

“…The detailed TH pulse characteristics will be verified further in subsequent sections. This power amplification mainly comes from the resonance between the 4 H 11/2 - 4 I 15/2 energy gap and the nonlinear electron dipole oscillation at the UCNP-substrate interface excited by the femtosecond pulse laser 23 , 24 , evidenced by the wavelength-selectivity of UCL-based TH enhancement. The amplification mechanism was further evaluated by the emission yield calculated from the linear-fit slope of the emission-intensity vs. pump-power-density plot as shown in Fig.…”

Effect of the Nonlinearity on Optical Properties of One-Dimensional Photonic Crystal

“…Lately, employing nonlinear elements in PCs opens up lots of new design opportunities. In comparison to ordinary linear PC structures, many interesting phenomena have been demonstrated using optically nonlinear components in PCs such as third-harmonic generation [10], four-wave mixing [11], and optical bistability [12]. When non-linearity is incorporated into a photonic crystal, the light propagation can be controlled dynamically [13], due to the intensity dependency of the refractive index (Kerr effect).…”

Electrical Excitation of Long-Range Surface Plasmons in PC/OLED Structure with Two Metal Nanolayers

“…A multilayer structure in the form [PC/M/air] has been proposed to simplify the implementation of LRSP in practical applications, where the external dielectric is air [14]. This approach was tested with diverse systems, including thin palladium layers (for ultrasensitive hydrogen detection [15][16][17]), thin gold layers in blue spectral range (for nitrogen dioxide detection [18]), and thin ferromagnetic cobalt layers (for magnetoplasmonics [19]), among others (see also [20][21][22][23] for examples of other applications).…”