Enhanced Optical Limiting Performance through Nonlinear Scattering in Nanoparticles of CdS, co-doped Ag-Cu, and BSO
P. Prem Kiran, S. Venugopal Rao, M. Ferrari, B. M. Krishna, H. Sekhar, Shadak Alee and D. Narayana Rao
Nanoparticles have been attracting wide interest due to their potential applications in the field of nanophotonics and optoelectronics. Most of the nanoparticles exhibit interesting nonlinear optical properties and are being used for optical limiting purposes due to absorptive nonlinearities such as, two/multi-photon absorption (TPA/MPA), excited state/Free-carrier absorption (ESA/FCA) processes etc. Though the absorptive processes often provide low limiting thresholds, most of the materials have low damage threshold limiting their applications for optical limiting studies. We present our efforts on enhancing the damage threshold through nonlinear scattering so that these materials can be used efficiently even at high input fluences. Our efforts to achieve this goal have been through the preparation and nonlinear optical characterization of metal nanoclusters, semiconductor nanoparticles, and ferroelectric nanocrystals dispersed in different media. Herein nonlinear scattering results from Ag-Cu co-doped nanoclusters in Sol-Gel films, CdS nanoparticles dispersed in dimethylformamide (DMF) and BSO nanocrystals dispersed in PMMA are presented.
Keywords: Optical limiting, nanoparticles, nonlinear scattering, nonlinear absorption.