Enhancement and electric charge-assisted tuning of nonlinear light generation in bipolar plasmonics

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a new plasmonic nonlinear light generation (NLG) structure, termed plasmonic-enhanced, charge-assisted second-harmonic generator (p-CASH), that not only achieves high second-harmonic generation (SHG) enhancement (76-fold), large SHG tunability by bias (8%/V), wide tuning range (280%), 7.8 × 10(-9) conversion efficiency, and high stability but also exhibits a SHG tuning, that is bipolar rather than unipolar, not due to the third-order nonlinear polarization term, hence fundamentally different from the classic electric field induced SHG-tuning (EFISH). We propose a new SHG tuning mechanism: the second-order nonlinear polarization term enhanced by plasmonic effects, changed by charge injection and negative oxygen vacancies movement, and is nearly 3 orders of magnitude larger than EFISH. p-CASH is a bipolar parallel-plate capacitor with thin layers of plasmonic nanostructures, a TiOx (semiconductor and nonlinear) and a SiO2 (insulator) sandwiched between two electrodes. Fabrication of p-CASH used nanoimprint on 4″ wafer and is scalable to wallpaper-sized areas. The new structure, new properties, and new understanding should open up various new designs and applications of NLG in various fields.