• Sergey V. Makarov
  • Mihail I. Petrov
  • Urs Zywietz
  • Valentin Milichko
  • Dmitry Zuev
  • Natalia Lopanitsyna
  • Alexey Kuksin
  • Ivan Mukhin
  • George Zograf
  • Evgeniy Ubyivovk
  • Daria A. Smirnova
  • Sergey Starikov
  • Boris N. Chichkov
  • Yuri S. Kivshar

Recent trends to employ high-index dielectric particles in nanophotonics are motivated by their reduced dissipative losses and large resonant enhancement of nonlinear effects at the nanoscale. Because silicon is a centrosymmetric material, the studies of nonlinear optical properties of silicon nanoparticles have been targeting primarily the third-harmonic generation effects. Here we demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, that resonantly excited nanocrystalline silicon nanoparticles fabricated by an optimized laser printing technique can exhibit strong second-harmonic generation (SHG) effects. We attribute an unexpectedly high yield of the nonlinear conversion to a nanocrystalline structure of nanoparticles supporting the Mie resonances. The demonstrated efficient SHG at green light from a single silicon nanoparticle is 2 orders of magnitude higher than that from unstructured silicon films. This efficiency is significantly higher than that of many plasmonic nanostructures and small silicon nanoparticles in the visible range, and it can be useful for a design of nonlinear nanoantennas and silicon-based integrated light sources.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3047-3053
Number of pages7
JournalNano Letters
Volume17
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 May 2017

    Research areas

  • crystallization kinetics, dielectric nanoantennas, magnetic dipole resonance, Mie scattering, Nonlinear nanophotonics, second-harmonic generation, silicon nanoparticles

    Scopus subject areas

  • Bioengineering
  • Chemistry(all)
  • Materials Science(all)
  • Condensed Matter Physics
  • Mechanical Engineering

ID: 11746782