Femtosecond laser pulse splitting effect in second harmonic generation under Laue diffraction in one-dimensional photonic crystals

Abstract

The ability to manipulate the frequency of light is a cornerstone of a wide range of applications in photonics expanding spectral ranges of the light sources. To boost the second harmonic generation efficiency, intense efforts toward exploiting artificial microstructures for frequency doubling were carried out. The sought-after approach of utilizing photonic crystals is inspired by their unusual light dispersion. In such structures, the dynamics of the field of femtosecond laser pulses is of paramount importance for frequency conversion. In this work, we investigate the phase-matched second harmonic generation under the effect of diffraction-induced femtosecond laser pulse splitting in one-dimensional photonic crystals at the Bragg diffraction in the Laue geometry. We demonstrate that the interaction of the two pulses at the fundamental frequency that appears in photonic crystals through the dynamical light diffraction leads to a nonmonotonic dependence of the frequency up-conversion efficiency with respect to the laser pulse duration, thus allowing to increase the second harmonic power by tuning the pulse duration.