Symmetry breaking in the second harmonic field of self-assembled metallic nanostructures

摘要

Here we present both an overview of different nonlinear optical phenomena occurring in nanopatterned materials and new results on the symmetry induced second harmonic generation (SHG) signal from metallic nanowires. A discussion about symmetry breaking in artificial chiral metamaterials is presented, while the experimental evidence was given by second order nonlinear optical measurements on different samples. Here, new SHG measurements on regular array of tilted nanowires (NWs) produced by grazing evaporating gold on a silicon substrate were presented and discussed. The surface composed by tilted wires can induce an optical chiral response of the whole sample when the light impinges on the sample on an out-of-normal incidence angle (extrinsic chirality). The measurements were performed by using circular polarised laser excitation at the wavelength of 800nm and by observing the second harmonic response at the wavelength of 400nm in different polarization states. The second harmonic generation process results to be very sensitive to the symmetry breaking at the interfaces of investigated samples.