English

Optothermal nonlinearity of silica aerogel

Other Condensed Matter 2016-11-02 v1 Optics

Abstract

We report on the characterization of silica aerogel thermal optical nonlinearity, obtained by z-scan technique. The results show that typical silica aerogels have nonlinear optical coefficient similar to that of glass (1012(\simeq 10^{-12} m2/^2/W), with negligible optical nonlinear absorption. The non\-li\-near coefficient can be increased to values in the range of 101010^{-10} m2/^2/W by embedding an absorbing dye in the aerogel. This value is one order of magnitude higher than that observed in the pure dye and in typical highly nonlinear materials like liquid crystals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.00238,
  title  = {Optothermal nonlinearity of silica aerogel},
  author = {Maria Chiara Braidotti and Silvia Gentilini and Adam Fleming and Michiel C. Samuels and Andrea Di Falco and Claudio Conti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.00238},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

5 pages, 5 figures, Published by AIP Publishing