Controlling hybrid nonlinearities in transparent conducting oxides via two-colour excitation

Abstract

Nanophotonics and metamaterials have revolutionised the way we think about optical space (epsilon, mu), enabling us to engineer the refractive index almost at will, to confine light to the smallest of the volumes, and to manipulate optical signals with extremely small footprints and energy requirements. Significant efforts are now devoted to finding suitable materials and strategies for the dynamic control of the optical properties. Transparent conductive oxides exhibit large ultrafast nonlinearities under both interband and intraband excitations. Here, we show that combining these two effects in aluminium-doped zinc oxide via a two colour laser field discloses new material functionalities. Owing to the independence of the two nonlinearities the ultrafast temporal dynamics of the material permittivity can be designed by acting on the amplitude and delay of the two fields. We demonstrate the potential applications of this novel degree of freedom by dynamically addressing the modulation bandwidth and optical spectral tuning of a probe optical pulse.

References in corpus (8)

• Epsilon-Near-Zero (ENZ) Metamaterials and Electromagnetic Sources: Tailoring the Radiation Phase Pattern
• Gate-tunable conducting oxide metasurfaces
• Enhanced nonlinear refractive index in epsilon-near-zero materials
• Theory of Supercoupling, Squeezing Wave Energy, and Field Confinement in Narrow Channels and Tight Bends Using Epsilon-Near-Zero Metamaterials
• Enhanced third harmonic generation from the epsilon-near-zero modes of ultrathin films
• Ultrafast all-optical switching via coherent modulation of metamaterial absorption
• Ultrafast plasmonics using transparent conductive oxide hybrids in the epsilon near-zero regime
• Optically induced metal-to-dielectric transition in Epsilon-Near-Zero metamaterials

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• Adiabatic frequency shifting in epsilon near zero materials: The role of group velocity
• Negative refraction in time-varying, strongly-coupled plasmonic antenna-ENZ systems
• Photonic time crystals: Theory and applications
• Post-2000 Nonlinear Optical Materials and Measurements: Data Tables and Best Practices
• New horizons in near-zero refractive index photonics and hyperbolic metamaterials
• Ultratunable quantum frequency conversion in photonic crystal fiber
• Generation and Enhancement of Persistent Nanoscale Magnetization in All-Dielectric Metasurfaces by Optically Injected and Localized Free Carriers
• Fast and slow nonlinearities in ENZ materials