Kerr and four-wave mixing spectroscopy at the band edge of one-dimensional photonic crystals

Abstract

Kerr and four-wave mixing spectroscopy is shown to be a powerful technique to quantify the strong enhancement of the third-order optical nonlinear susceptibilities at the band edge of photonic crystals. Local field factors of about 5 are demonstrated for crossed Kerr effect and a narrow resonance peak observed for the conjugate reflectivity. Moreover, a reduction of the effective nonlinear susceptibility of the four-wave mixing process with increasing pump intensities is measured, which is due to different Kerr-induced blueshifts of the band edge for forward and backward pump beams and signal and conjugate beams. This observation definitely demonstrates the need for considering all the nonlinear processes for the optimization of nonlinear photonic crystals for a given application in optical signal processing.