Hybrid photonic nanomaterials for nanoscale nonlinear interactions (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

Photonics nanomaterials are considered to be a major source of innovation for advanced optical systems, since their electromagnetic properties can be engineered by implementing a suitable geometry of their nano-sized elementary unit cells. While for many applications mainly their far field properties, i.e. the influence on the reflected, transmitted, and scattered fields measurable in a distance large compared to the exciting wavelength, are of interest, they provide many degrees of freedom to influence also the nearfields surrounding the unit cells. This becomes important particularly if nonlinear light matter interaction is exploited, where the far field response depends critically on the local field strength. Hence nanomaterials offer a conceptually new way to tailor the nonlinear material properties to the needs of particular applications. Furthermore new types of nonlinearities, by e.g. surface effects, become important, due to the increased surface to volume ratio of nanomaterials. In this presentation we will present our recent results on nonlinear optical investigations of photonic nanomaterials, which derive from the hybridization of resonant photonic nanostructures, which provide highly dispersive field enhancement. The hybridization of such metallic or dielectric nanoresonators with highly nonlinear materials, as e.g. atomically thin semiconducting membranes, classical semiconductors, or ferroelectrics, provides a route towards even more efficient nonlinear processes. Furthermore we will show examples of how the combined control of dispersive and nonlinear properties can be exploited to address applications in frequency conversion, quantum light sources and sensing.