Photorefractive tuning seeded by third-harmonic light in a diamond photonic crystal cavity

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Single-crystal diamond nanocavities have tremendous potential for use in quantum and nonlinear optical technologies. The ability to precisely control their resonant frequencies is essential for many applications, and in situ tuning is particularly desirable. In this work, we demonstrate deterministic resonance tuning of a diamond nanocavity. We observed a photorefractive effect in concert with the generation of third-harmonic light within the device. This effect blue-shifted the cavity resonance frequency by 20.2 (2) GHz, exceeding the cavity linewidth. The shift corresponded to a fractional change in refractive index of −1.05(1)×10 −4 , and its relaxation occurred over several tens of hours. Although photorefraction is a second-order nonlinear effect and has previously not been observed in diamond owing to its vanishing χ (2) , the observed behavior is consistent with the generation of non-zero χ (2) by electric fields from charged crystal defects. In addition to allowing tuning of diamond cavities for resonant nonlinear and quantum photonics applications, this observation could enable the realization of diamond frequency converters and electro-optical modulators that rely on second-order nonlinearity.
Funding Information
  • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Discovery Grant program)
  • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Research Tools and Instruments program)
  • Alberta Innovates (Strategic Research Project)
  • Canada Foundation for Innovation
  • Swiss National Science Foundation (Project No. P500PT_206919)

This publication has 183 references indexed in Scilit: