Numerical study of the optical nonlinearity of doped and gapped graphene: From weak to strong field excitation

Abstract

Numerically solving the semiconductor Bloch equations within a phenomenological relaxation time approximation, we extract both the linear and nonlinear optical conductivities of doped graphene and gapped graphene under excitation by a laser pulse. We discuss in detail the dependence of second harmonic generation, third harmonic generation, and the Kerr effects on the doping level, the gap, and the electric field amplitude. The numerical results for weak electric fields agree with those calculated from available analytic perturbation formulas. For strong electric fields when saturation effects are important, all the effective third order nonlinear response coefficients show a strong field dependence.