Doubly Enhanced Third Harmonic Generation in Metal-Based Silicon Nanodisks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a significant enhancement in third harmonic generation in silicon nanodisks on a metal substrate, leveraging electric dipole resonance and surface plasmon coupling to achieve over eight orders of magnitude improvement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel metal-dielectric nanostructure that combines electric dipole resonance and surface plasmon resonance for greatly enhanced third harmonic generation.

Findings

THG efficiency increased by over eight orders of magnitude.

Coupling of EDR and PSPR enhances nonlinear optical response.

Silicon Kerr effect further boosts THG efficiency to 10^-2 at high input intensity.

Abstract

Doubly enhanced third harmonic generation (THG) is realized by the electric dipole resonance (EDR) in silicon nanodisks placed onto a metallic film at near-infrared. By introducing the metal substrate, the perfect electric conductor (PEC) surface effect can be formed to not only enhance the electric field in silicon, but also improve the near-field distribution. Meanwhile, in consideration of the periodic nanostructure, the silicon nanodisk, acting as a high-refractive-index dielectric grating, can generate a propagating surface plasmon resonance (PSPR) on the metal surface. By flexibly manipulating the array period, PSPR can effectively couple with EDR, which produces further enhancement and novel properties for EDR. On account of the dual enhancements from these two effects, it is demonstrated that the total THG conversion efficiency of the proposed nanostructure is raised by more than eight orders of magnitude as compared with that of the all-dielectric nanostructure. In addition, the influence of silicon Kerr effect on the coupling and THG is investigated as well, manifesting an unprecedent THG efficiency around 10^-2 with input internsity 2 GW/cm^2. This work will pave a new way for improving the multipolar mode in metal-dielectric nanosturctures and facilitate its engineered applications in nonlinear optics, e.g. frequency conversion, spectroscopic and biochemical sensing.