2013/09/07 by Jacob B. Khurgin, Jacob B Khurgin, Greg Sun
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Figure of merit #Laser #Materials science #Nonlinear Optical Materials Studies #Nonlinear optics #Nonlinear system #Optics #Physics #Plasmon #Plasmonic and Surface Plasmon Research #Surface plasmon #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1364/oe.21.027460
published as Optics Express, Vol. 21, Issue 22, pp. 27460-27480 (2013)
arxiv created 2013/09/07 · openalex publication_date 2013/11/04 · arxiv updated 2017/07/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Recent years have seen increased interest in the plasmonic enhancement of nonlinear optical effects, yet there remains an uncertainty as to the limits of this enhancement. We present a simple and physically transparent theory for the plasmonic enhancement of third order nonlinear optical processes and show that while a huge enhancement of the effective nonlinear index can be attained, the most relevant figure of merit, the phase shift per one absorption length, remains very low. This suggests that while nonlinear plasmonic materials are not suitable for applications requiring high efficiency, for example in all-optical switching and wavelength conversion, they can be very useful for applications where overall high efficiency is not critical, such as in sensing.