Supercontinuum and second harmonic generation in amorphous silica nanowires

Presentation Date: 

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Location: 

Glass & Optical Materials Division Fall 2004 Meeting (Cocoa Beach, FL)

Presentation Slides: 

We developed a technique for drawing long, free-standing silica nanowires with diameters down to 50 nm and lengths up to 40 mm. The wire core is amorphous and of very uniform diameter. The wire surface has atomic level smoothness. The wire can guide a single mode of visible or near-infrared light. Because the diameter of the fiber is smaller than the wavelength, however, a large portion of the guided light is in the form of an evanescent field surrounding the nanowire. When amplified femtosecond laser pulses are coupled into these wires, surprising nonlinear optical effects are observed: in addition to efficient supercontinuum generation around the seed wavelength of 800 nm, we find strong emission around 400 nm.