Laser pulse creates frequency doubling in amorphous dielectric material

Georgia Tech researchers have demonstrated an all-optical technique for creating robust second-order nonlinear effects in materials that don’t normally support them. Using a laser pulse fired at an array of gold triangles on a titanium dioxide (TiO2) slab, the researchers created excited electrons that briefly doubled the frequency of a beam from a second laser as it bounced off the amorphous TiO2 slab.

By widening the range of optical materials useful for micro- and nanoscale optoelectronic applications, the work could give optical engineers new options for creating second-order nonlinear effects, which are important in such areas as optical computers, high-speed data processors and bioimaging safe for use in the human body.

“Now that we can optically break the crystalline symmetry of traditionally linear materials such as amorphous titanium dioxide, a much wider range of optical materials can be adopted in the mainstream of micro- and nanotechnology applications such as high-speed optical data processors,” said Wenshan Cai, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A majority of optical materials tend to have a symmetric crystal structure that limits their ability to create second-order nonlinear effects such as frequency doubling that have important technological applications. Until now, this symmetry could only be interrupted by applying electrical signals or mechanical strain to the crystal.

In the laboratory, Cai and collaborators Mohammad Taghinejad, Zihao Xu, Kyu-Tae Lee and Tianquan Lian created an array of tiny plasmonic gold triangles on the surface of a centrosymmetric TiO2 slab. They then illuminated the TiO2/gold structure with a pulse of red laser light, which acted as an optical switch for breaking the crystal symmetry of the material. The amorphous TiO2 slab would not naturally support strong second-order nonlinear effects.

“The optical switch excites high-energy electrons inside the gold triangles, and some of the electrons migrate to the titanium dioxide from the triangles’ tips,” Cai explained. “Since the migration of electrons to the TiO2 slab primarily happens at the tips of triangles, the electron migration is spatially an asymmetric process, fleetingly breaking the titanium dioxide crystal symmetry in an optical fashion.”

Georgia Tech researchers Kyu-Tae Lee and Mohammad Taghinejad demonstrate frequency doubling on a slab of titanium dioxide using a red laser to create nonlinear effects with tiny triangles of gold. The blue beam shows the frequency-doubled light and the green beam controls the hot-electron migration. Courtesy: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech[/caption]

Frequency doubling is just one potential application for the technique, he said.

“We believe that our findings not only provide varieties of opportunities in the field of nonlinear nanophotonics, but also will play a major role in the field of quantum electron tunneling,” Cai added. “Indeed, built upon the accumulated knowledge in this field, our group is devising new paradigms to employ the introduced symmetry breaking technique as an optical probe for monitoring the quantum tunneling of electrons in hybrid material platforms. Nowadays, achieving this challenging goal is only possible with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) techniques, which are very slow and show low yield and sensitivity.”

– Edited by Chris Vavra, associate editor, Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology, cvavra@cfemedia.com.

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