Cascading effects, nonlinear optical

Cascading. In most cases, the distinction between second- and third-order nonlinearities is evident from the different phenomena each produce. That distinction blurs, however, when one considers the cascading of second-order effects to produce third-order nonlinear phenomena (51). In a cascaded process, the nonlinear optical field generated as a second-order response at one place combines anew with the incident field in a subsequent second-order process. Figure 2 shows a schematic of this effect at the molecular level where second-order effects in noncentrosymmetric molecules combine to yield a third-order response that may be difficult to separate from a pure third-order process. This form of cascading is complicated by the near-field relationships that appear in the interaction between molecules, but analysis of cascaded phenomena is of interest, because it provides a way to explore local fields and the correlations between orientations of dipoles in a centros5nnmetric material (52). 

The contributions to the fifth-order nonlinear optical susceptibility of dense medium have been theoretically estimated by using both the local-field-corrected Maxwell-Bloch equations and Bloembergen s approach. In addition to the obvious fifth-order hyperpolarizability contribution, the fifth-order NLO susceptibility contains an extra term, which is proportional to the square of the third-order hyperpolarizability and which originates purely from local-field effects, as a cascaded contribution. Using as model the sodium 3s 3p transition system, it has been shown that the relative contribution of the cascaded term to the fifth-order NLO susceptibility grows with the increase of the atomic density and then saturates. 

Cascading. In most cases, the distinction between second- and third-order nonlinearities is evident from the different phenomena each produce. That distinction blurs, however, when one considers the cascading of second-order effects to produce third-order nonlinear phenomena (51). In a cascaded process, the nonlinear optical field generated as a second-order response at one place combines anew with the incident field in a subsequent second-order process. Figure 2 shows... 

To demonstrate the method an example of a slow-wave optical structure is modelled. Such structures consist of a cascade of directly coupled optical resonators in order to enhance the nonlinear effects. The structure used here was recently defined within Working Group 2 of the European Action COST Pll (http //w3.uniromal.it/energetica/slow waves.doc). One period of the structure consists of one-dimensional Fabry-Perot cavity placed between two distributed Bragg reflectors (DBR) and can be described by the sequence... 

Through cascade second-order effects, the second-order optical nonlinearities result on a third-order optical effect in a multistep or cascade process. This process is a due to the existence of microscopic electric fields that are generated by second-order nonlinear aligning of molecular dipoles. 

The phase mismatch which impedes the second-harmonic generation leads also to the cascading of quadratic nonlinearities and the induced phase shift. This effect has been used in continuous-wave optical devices and much effort has been devoted to the classical description of light propagation. We address the quantum theory of steady-state propagation of light and compare this formalism... 

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