Nonlinear optical properties of TeO${}_2$ crystalline phases from first principles

Abstract

We have computed second and third nonlinear optical susceptibilities of two crystalline bulk tellurium oxide polymorphs: $\alpha$-TeO${}_2$ (the most stable crystalline bulk phase) and $\gamma$-TeO${}_2$ (the crystalline phase that ressembles the more to the glass phase. Third order nonlinear susceptibilities of the crystalline phases are two orders of magnitude larger than $\alpha$-SiO${}_2$ cristoballite, thus extending the experimental observations on glasses to the case of crystalline compounds. While the electronic lone pairs of Te contribute to those large values, a full explanation of the anisotropy of the third order susceptibility tensor requires a detailed analysis of the structure, in particular the presence of helical chains, that seems to be linked to cooperative non-local polarizabilty effects. Our results demonstrate that first-principles simulations are a powerful predictive tool to estimate nonlinear optical susceptibilitites of materials.

12 pages, 6 figures. Typos in Eq.(9) and Eq. (12) corrected

References in corpus (2)

• Ab initio study of the vibrational properties of crystalline TeO2: The alpha, beta, and gamma phases
• Structural stability and lattice dynamics of SiO2 cristobalite