Nonlinear Fresnel coefficients due to giant ultrafast nonlinearities in indium tin oxide (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

We present measurements of nonlinear refraction and absorption in transparent conductive oxides (TCO), which are essentially highly-doped semiconductors, at Epsilon-Near-Zero (ENZ). In this spectral region, where the real part of the permittivity crosses zero, materials demonstrate interesting nonlinear properties such as enhanced harmonic generation, nonlinear absorption (NLA), and nonlinear refraction (NLR). We find that induced changes in the refractive index of Indium Tin Oxide, can be very large with respect to the initial index. This means that the even the Fresnel coefficients are highly irradiance-dependent. Therefore, the nonlinear transmission, reflection, and absorption of the material will be significantly different from conventional materials which means that it is challenging to use conventional methods such as Z-Scan and time-resolved transmission and reflection techniques to accurately determine the underlying nonlinear optical coefficients. We have studied optical nonlinearities of TCOs using the Beam-Deflection (BD) method to independently characterize the temporal dynamics and polarization dependence of the NLR. This method enables us to resolve NLR in the presence of large NLA backgrounds. In addition, we can also study the dependence on relative polarization and incidence angle of excitation and probe waves to characterize the enhancement mechanism and the physical origin of the nonlinear response. We conduct these BD measurements in conjunction with Z-Scan and transient reflection and transmission at different wavelengths, incidence angle, and polarization. Our measurements reveal that there is a strong wavelength dependence of nonlinearities around the ENZ point. We find that the wavelength dependence is quite different for excitation and probe waves.