Regular Article

Low- and high-order nonlinear optical studies of ZnO nanocrystals, nanoparticles, and nanorods

¹ The Guo China-US Photonics Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130033, P.R. China
² Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro- and Nano-Materials of Ministry of Education of China, School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, 430072 Wuhan, P.R. China
³ Institute of Ion-Plasma and Laser Technologies, Tashkent 100125, Uzbekistan
⁴ Faculty of Physics, Voronezh State University, 1 University Square, Voronezh 394006, Russia
⁵ The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA

^a email: ganjaboy_boltaev@mail.ru

Received: 26 March 2019
Received in final form: 4 August 2019
Published online: 15 November 2019

Abstract

Variable shapes and sizes of the zinc oxide nanostructures attract the attention due to the peculiarities of their nonlinear optical properties. We report the second-, third-, and high-order nonlinear optical studies of ZnO nanostructures using 800 nm, 40 fs pulses. We analyze the second harmonic generation as a function of the energy of the 800 nm laser pulses irradiating ZnO nanostructures. The studied samples possess the quadratic dependence of the second harmonic yield at the variable intensity of laser radiation. The Z-scan studies of ZnO nanoparticles suspension using 400 nm probe pulses allow determining their nonlinear refractive index (4 × 10⁻¹¹ cm² W⁻¹) and nonlinear absorption coefficient (8 × 10⁻⁷ cm W⁻¹). We also analyze the optical limiting properties of ZnO nanoparticles suspension. The propagation of femtosecond pulses through the plasmas containing ZnO nanoparticles allowed generation of high harmonics up to the 29th order.