Metallic nanostructures as electronic billiards for nonlinear terahertz photonics

authored by

Ihar Babushkin, Liping Shi, Ayhan Demircan, Uwe Morgner, Joachim Herrmann, Anton Husakou

Abstract

The optical properties of metallic nanoparticles are most often considered in terms of plasmons, the coupled states of light and quasifree electrons. Confinement of electrons inside the nanostructure leads to another, very different type of resonances. We demonstrate that these confinement-induced resonances typically join into a single composite "super-resonance,"located at significantly lower frequencies than the plasmonic resonance. This super-resonance influences the optical properties in the low-frequency range, in particular, producing giant nonlinearities. We show that such nonlinearities can be used for efficient down-conversion from optical to terahertz and midinfrared frequencies on the submicrometer propagation distances in nanocomposites. We discuss the interaction of the quantum-confinement-induced super-resonance with the conventional plasmonic ones, as well as the unusual quantum level statistics, adapting here the paradigms of the quantum billiard theory and showing the possibility to control the resonance position and width using the geometry of the nanostructures.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Quantum Optics
PhoenixD: Photonics, Optics, and Engineering - Innovation Across Disciplines

External Organisation(s)

Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy im Forschungsbund Berlin e.V. (MBI)
Xidian University

Type

Article

Journal

Physical Review Research

Volume

5

No. of pages

14

ISSN

2643-1564

Publication date

14.11.2023

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Physics and Astronomy(all)

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.14637 (Access: Open)
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.043151 (Access: Open)