Evaluation of Microscopic Origins in Nonlinear Optical Crystals: Based on Rigorous Atomic Space Tessellating

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rigorous atomic space tessellating method to evaluate atomic contributions to nonlinear optical responses in crystals, revealing detailed insights into the roles of specific atoms and transitions in SHG and linear optics.

Contribution

The study presents a parameter-free atomic tessellating approach to analyze atomic contributions in NLO crystals, improving understanding of microscopic origins of optical responses.

Findings

Significant differences between static and dynamic SHG susceptibility contributions.

On-site Sb transition dominates SHG effects, while O-Sb off-site transitions are crucial.

Sb3+ significantly influences linear optical anisotropy.

Abstract

Clarifying the contribution of various atoms and structural units formed in nonlinear optical (NLO) crystal materials to macroscopic optical response is crucial for NLO crystal design. In this work, the rigorous atomic space tessellating (AST) method without any empirical parameters is introduced to evaluate the correlated contributions in wavelength dependent optical responses. The NLO crystal CsSbF2SO4 with significant asymmetric electron distribution of Sb3+ was selected as the case study. This study indicates that there are significant differences in atomic and dipole moment contributions between static and dynamic second harmonic generation (SHG) susceptibility. Using only the information obtained from NLO-active unit analysis of static SHG susceptibilities to explain the NLO phenomenon in actual photoexcitation can even lead to qualitative errors. Among all the transitions in SHG effects, the on-site transition of Sb has the largest component, while the O-Sb off-site transition with multiple transition channels contributes the most to the macroscopic SHG susceptibilities. The relevant methods have also been extended to linear optics and used to study first-order susceptibilities anisotropy, which is important for achieving phase matching. Sb3+ contributes significantly to the linear optical anisotropy with the same sign as SO42-.