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Nonlinear optics

Exploiting disparity

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Although two-photon absorption in a semiconductor is typically a very weak effect, the rate of absorption increases dramatically when the two photons have very dissimilar wavelengths, enabling applications such as ultrafast optical sampling and room-temperature mid-infrared detection.

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Figure 1: Theoretically predicted enhancement in the rate of non-degenerate TPA, F2symm(x1, x2), as a function of the normalized photon energies x1 and x2.

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Correspondence to Thomas E. Murphy.

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Murphy, T. Exploiting disparity. Nature Photon 5, 515–516 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.202

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