Optothermal nonlinearity of silica aerogel

We report on the characterization of silica aerogel thermal optical nonlinearity, obtained by z-scan technique. The results show that typical Silica Aerogels have nonlinear optical coefficient similar to that of glass (≃ 10-12m2/W), with negligible optical nonlinear absorption. The nonlinear coefficient can be increased to values in the range of 10-10m2/W by embedding an absorbing dye in the Aerogel. This value is one order of magnitude higher than that observed in the pure dye and in typical highly nonlinear materials like liquid crystals.

Citation

Braidotti , M C , Gentilini , S , Fleming , A , Samuels , M C , Di Falco , A & Conti , C 2016 , ' Optothermal nonlinearity of silica aerogel ' , Applied Physics Letters , vol. 109 , no. 4 , 041104 . https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4959240

Publication

Applied Physics Letters

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4959240

ISSN

0003-6951

Type

Journal item

Rights

Copyright 2016 the Authors. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at http://apl.aip.org/

Description

The authors acknowledge support from EPSRC (EP/J004200/1), the Templeton Foundation (grant number 58277) and the ERC project VANGUARD (grant number 664782).

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/9108