Third harmonic generation from the gold/amorphous silicon hybrid metasurface

Abstract

The nonlinear optical properties of silicon have great potentials for developing all-optical switches and modulators, etc. Strategies based on all dielectric silicon photonic crystals and resonators have been proposed to design the nanophotonic devices with high nonlinearity. Nevertheless, the lack of compatible configuration with the mature CMOS technology may hinder the practical applications of the all dielectric devices. In this work, we proposed a metal-silicon hybrid metasurface to generate strong third harmonic signals from an amorphous silicon (α-Si) film. By integrating the α-Si film into a gold plasmonic nanocavity and controlling the periods of the gold meta-atoms, the efficiency of the THG process is expected to be greatly boosted. Compared to the planar α-Si film, the THG signal is enhanced by a factor of ∼370. The presented results in this work may open new routes for developing various silicon photonic devices with high optical nonlinearity.