An All-Dielectric Polaritonic Metasurface with a Giant Nonlinear Optical Response

Raktim Sarma; Jiaming Xu; Domenico de Ceglia; Luca Carletti; Salvatore Campione; John Klem; Michael B Sinclair; Mikhail A Belkin; Igal Brener

doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c03325

An All-Dielectric Polaritonic Metasurface with a Giant Nonlinear Optical Response

Nano Lett. 2022 Feb 9;22(3):896-903. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c03325. Epub 2022 Jan 19.

Authors

Raktim Sarma^{1

2}, Jiaming Xu³, Domenico de Ceglia⁴, Luca Carletti^{4

5}, Salvatore Campione¹, John Klem¹, Michael B Sinclair¹, Mikhail A Belkin^{3

6}, Igal Brener^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87123, United States.
² Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87123, United States.
³ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, United States.
⁴ Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Padua 35122, Italy.
⁵ Department of Information Engineering and INO-CNR, University of Brescia, Brescia 25121, Italy.
⁶ Walter Schottky Institut, Technische Universitat Munchen, Garching 85748, Bavaria, Germany.

PMID: 35043628
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c03325

Abstract

Enhancing the efficiency of second-harmonic generation using all-dielectric metasurfaces to date has mostly focused on electromagnetic engineering of optical modes in the meta-atom. Further advances in nonlinear conversion efficiencies can be gained by engineering the material nonlinearities at the nanoscale, however this cannot be achieved using conventional materials. Semiconductor heterostructures that support resonant nonlinearities using quantum engineered intersubband transitions can provide this new degree of freedom. By simultaneously optimizing the heterostructures and meta-atoms, we experimentally realize an all-dielectric polaritonic metasurface with a maximum second-harmonic generation power conversion factor of 0.5 mW/W² and power conversion efficiencies of 0.015% at nominal pump intensities of 11 kW/cm². These conversion efficiencies are higher than the record values reported to date in all-dielectric nonlinear metasurfaces but with 3 orders of magnitude lower pump power. Our results therefore open a new direction for designing efficient nonlinear all-dielectric metasurfaces for new classical and quantum light sources.

Keywords: All-Dielectric metasurfaces; III−V semiconductors; Intersubband transitions; Nonlinear metasurfaces; Polaritons; Second-harmonic generation; Strong light-matter interaction.