Confinement and enhancement of light in structures only few atomic diameters across may enable a new class of devices with functionalities in the macroscopic continuum. Pushing toward the ultraviolet range calls for renewed studies of metals, semiconductors, and conductive oxides. For example, aluminum is inexpensive, stable, abundant, has a unique spectral response, and is compatible with metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. We use a hydrodynamic-Maxwell approach to study harmonic generation in nanolayers and gratings in the femtosecond regime and compare with predictions of harmonic generation from gold and silicon gratings, and a cadmium oxide nanofilm arranged in a Kretschmann configuration.
We present experimental measurements of SHG and THG in the visible and UV ranges from crystalline silicon membranes 200nm to 2microns in thickness, and use the physical parameters retrieved to predict the properties of silicon metasurfaces. Our theoretical model predicts well both spectral and angular responses and efficiencies of the membranes. Silicon is centrosymmetric but possesses a third order nonlinearity that is dispersive and relatively large in the UV range. The results also suggest that judicious exploitation of the nonlinear dispersion of ordinary semiconductors has the potential to transform device physics well into the UV range.
We discuss traditional second and third harmonic generation from metallic mirrors, gratings, and novel nonlinear optical properties of metal/vacuum interfaces. The boundary is a spillout region composed of free electrons having exponentially decreasing density that vanishes within an atomic diameter. Classical electrodynamics cannot discern field variations either between atoms or over the distance of a decaying wave function. The boundary consists of a single spatial discretization step, a function of unknown average density. This layer acts like an epsilon-near-zero material that enhances the local field by more than three orders of magnitude, alongside a dramatic decrease of nonlinear thresholds.
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