Enhancing Nonlinear Optical Interactions and Applications with Near-Zero-Index Materials
Abstract
Light is an exceptionally powerful tool for interacting with our world, allowing us to sense our environment, communicate across the globe, and diagnosing diseases. To succeed in these applications, control over the properties of light such as amplitude, wavelength, and phase are required, and photonic researchers have spent centuries developing techniques to accomplish this. Among the studied approaches, nonlinear phenomena are particularly versatile and powerful because they allow an electrical or optical signal to dynamically modify the properties of a passing light beam with instantaneous response times. However, photons do not strongly interact with each other and a host material (e.g. nonlinear crystal) is required to mediate the interaction. Unfortunately, the nonlinear response of most materials is generally quite weak (10-16 – 10-22 m2/V2 for third-order processes), and require significant light intensities and strong light-matter interactions to observe and utilize. Therefore, a key point of study as the field continues to grow is investigating methods to increase the efficiency of nonlinear processes. This proposal will directly assess this problem, testing new ways to enhance the nonlinearity of a thin filmusing regions where the refractive index is close to zero while simultaneously evaluating the performance of several key applications enabled by the increased nonlinearity. This unique near-zero-index (NZI) material condition found in heavily doped semiconductors such as gallium doped zinc oxide (GZO) provides a simple and robust path to eliminate phase matching conditions, and squeeze light into extremely small spaces for enhancement of the overall nonlinear effect.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Apr 09, 2018
- Source ID
- FA95501810151
Entities
People
- Nathaniel Kinsey
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- United States Air Force
- Virginia Commonwealth University