Origin of thermally induced second harmonic generation in PbO-B2O3 glasses

Optical second harmonic generation (SHG) with second-order nonlinearity χ((2)) as high as 2.1 pm/V has been achieved in water quenched PbO-B(2)O(3) glasses. No nonlinear depletion layer or microcrystals were observed in these glasses and the mechanism for nonlinearity has been explored in this Letter. Our results show that the possible mechanism for SHG in these glasses can be attributed to their low thermal conductivity that led to a large surface stress gradient, which broke the inversion symmetry of the glasses and subsequently induced the nonlinear effect. These findings suggest that low thermal conductivity induced high stress gradients to lead to large SHG.