Polarized second-harmonic generation using two fundamental beams, instead of one, offers significant advantages for characterizing nonlinear optical thin films. The technique is more precise and allows the internal consistency ...

The symmetry of metal nanostructures may be broken by their overall features or small-scale defects. To separate the roles of these two mechanisms in chiral symmetry breaking, we prepare gold nanostructures with chirality ...

The authors demonstrate that photoinduced birefringence in azo-dye-doped polymers is strongly enhanced by hydrogen bonding between the guest molecules and the polymer host. The primary mechanism behind the enhancement is ...

An array of low-symmetry, L-shaped gold nanoparticles is shown to exhibit high sensitivity to the state of incident polarization. Small imperfections in the shape of the actual particles, including asymmetric arm lengths ...

We provide experimental evidence of higher multipole (magnetic dipole and electric quadrupole) radiation in second-harmonic (SH) generation from arrays of metal nanoparticles. Fundamental differences in the radiative ...

We computationally investigate polarized second-harmonic generation (SHG) of a spectrally broad femtosecond pulse following transmission through traditional quarter wave plates (QWPs). Because the sideband modes of a ...

We present a new technique, based on regression analysis, to determine the second-order nonlinear optical susceptibility tensor of thin films. The technique does not require the absolute levels or phases of measured signals ...

The authors demonstrate that a dielectric resonant waveguide grating can enhance optical second-harmonic generation by a factor of 550 compared to a similar flat surface. Their structure, which consists of purely dielectric ...

Second-harmonic generation from surfaces and thin films can be described by up to three nonlinear expansion coefficients, which are associated with the quadratic combinations of the p- and s-polarized components of the ...