Abstract
We studied the nonlinear absorptive characteristics (saturation intensity threshold and effective nonlinear absorption coefficients) and nonlinear refraction in a 50-nm-thick VO x thin amorphous film prepared by pulsed DC magnetron reactive sputtering. The absorptive and refractive nonlinearities were investigated by pump–probe and Z-scan techniques. The closed-aperture Z-scan results reveal self-defocussing characteristics of the amorphous VO x thin film for both nanosecond and picosecond pulse durations. Experimental results show that a phase transition does not occur in the range of intensities used for the experiments and the investigated sample can be treated as an amorphous semiconductor structure. The open-aperture Z-scan curves with nanosecond pulses exhibit saturable absorption for all input intensities. On the other hand, the open-aperture Z-scan curves with picosecond pulses exhibit nonlinear absorption/saturable absorption for low/high input intensities, respectively. Saturation intensity thresholds were found to be 15.3 MW/cm2 for 4-ns pulse duration and 586 MW/cm2 for 65-ps pulse duration.
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Kürüm, U., Öksüzoğlu, R.M., Yüksek, M. et al. The third order nonlinear optical characteristics of amorphous vanadium oxide thin film. Appl. Phys. A 104, 1025–1030 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-011-6496-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-011-6496-8