Intraband divergences in third order optical response of 2D systems

TL;DR

This paper reveals that large third-order nonlinear optical responses in 2D systems can be achieved through intraband divergences related to resonant conditions, with a detailed analysis of gapped graphene showing the underlying physics and potential for high response.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of intraband divergences as a new mechanism for large nonlinearities in 2D materials, supported by analytic expressions for gapped graphene.

Findings

Intraband divergences lead to large nonlinear optical responses.

Divergences are robust against band structure variations.

Analytic expressions for third order conductivities in gapped graphene are derived.

Abstract

The existence of large nonlinear optical coefficients is one of the preconditions for using nonlinear optical materials in nonlinear optical devices. For a crystal, such large coefficients can be achieved by matching photon energies with resonant energies between different bands, and so the details of the crystal band structure play an important role. Here we demonstrate that large third-order nonlinearities can also be generally obtained by a different strategy: As any of the incident frequencies or the sum of any two or three frequencies approaches zero, the doped or excited populations of electronic states lead to divergent contributions in the induced current density. We refer to these as intraband divergences, by analogy with the behavior of Drude conductivity in linear response. Physically, such resonant processes can be associated with a combination of inraband and interband optical transitions. Current-induced second order nonlinearity, coherent current injection, and jerk currents are all related to such divergences, and we find similar divergences in degenerate four wave mixing and cross-phase modulation under certain conditions. These divergences are limited by intraband relaxation parameters, and lead to a large optical response from a high quality sample; we find they are very robust with respect to variations in the details of the band structure. To clearly track all of these effects, we analyze gapped graphene, describing the electrons as massive Dirac fermions; under the relaxation time approximation, we derive analytic expressions for the third order conductivities, and identify the divergences that arise in describing the associated nonlinear phenomena.