Terahertz ionic Kerr effect: Two-phonon contribution to the nonlinear optical response in insulators

Abstract

The THz Kerr effect measures the birefringence induced in an otherwise isotropic material by a strong THz pulse driving the Raman-active excitations of the systems. Here we provide experimental evidence of a sizable Kerr response in insulating SrTiO3 due to infrared-active lattice vibrations. Such a signal, named ionic Kerr effect, is associated with the simultaneous excitation of multiple phonons. Thanks to a theoretical modeling of the time, polarization and temperature dependence of the birefringence we can disentangle the ionic Kerr effect from the off-resonant electronic excitations, providing an alternative tunable mechanism to modulate the refractive index on ultrashort time-scales via infra-red active phonons.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Terahertz electric-field driven dynamical multiferroicity in SrTiO${}_3$
• Investigating Josephson plasmons in layered cuprates via nonlinear terahertz spectroscopy
• Phonon-Polaritons in Non-Centrosymmetric Systems: Theory of Terahertz Pump-Optical Probe Spectroscopy
• Theory of terahertz pulse transmission through ferroelectric nanomembranes
• Two-dimensional THz spectroscopy in electronic systems: a many-body diagrammatic approach