Nonlinear optical spectroscopy of isotropic and anisotropic metallic nanocomposites

In this work, we studied the nonlinear absorption and refraction of isotropic and anisotropic metallic nanocomposites, which consist of Au and Ag nanoparticles (NPs) embedded in matrices of SiO₂. We performed this study at different wavelengths using the Z-scan technique in the picosecond regime. The wavelengths were selected accordingly to the absorption spectra of the nanocomposites, choosing wavelengths into the inter- and intra-band transitions regions, including the surface plasmon (SP) resonance, as well as in the transparent region. For the anisotropic nanocomposites, the polarization and the incident angle were varied in order to evaluate the different components of the third order susceptibility tensor, χ⁽³⁾. We observed dramatic changes of sign for both, nonlinear refraction and absorption, when passing from Au to Ag and/or varying the wave length. The results accentuate the importance of the hot-electrons contribution to the nonlinear optical response at this temporal regime, when compared to inter-band and intra-band transitions contributions.