Researchers at the University of Southampton’s ORC have created an artificial material with seven orders of magnitude larger nonlinear optical activity than is found in any natural materials.
The work of the team over the past year, which was led by Mengxin Ren, now published in Nature Communications [3 833(2012)], catapults nonlinear optical activity from a barely detectable phenomenon to a major optical effect, with new potential for practical applications such as optical signal processing.
Eric Plum, Advanced Research Fellow, explained: “The nanoscale confinement of light in metamaterials offers extremely strong effects unfolding in nanoscale volumes of a nonlinear medium. Our work shows how nonlinear plasmonics can become a solution for real applications. We’ve combined our recent breakthroughs of hundred-fold nanostructuring-enhanced nonlinearity of metal films and exceptionally large linear optical activity in metamaterials to achieve this leap in technology.”
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