Nonlinear optical response of Au metallic nanoparticles, synthesized and embedded in sapphire by using ion implantation, as a function of their size and shape is studied. The size of the Au NPs was varied by controlling the annealing time of the gold-irradiated sapphire in a reducing atmosphere. Their shape was changed from approximately spherical to prolate by swift heavy-ion irradiation using Si³⁺, obtaining an anisotropic composite consisting in deformed NPs, all oriented in the direction of the Si beam irradiation. At 532 nm and 26 ps pulses, the isotropic system shows negative nonlinear absorption increasing with size, and positive nonlinear refraction. On the other hand, prolate nanoparticles show negative (null) absorption and null (positive) refraction for the minor (major) axis. This kind of system also shows figures of merit and relaxing times in the order of the picoseconds, appropriate for all-optical switching applications.

High-energy metallic ions were implanted in silica matrices, obtaining spherical-like metallic nanoparticles (NPs) after a proper thermal treatment. These NPs were then deformed by irradiation with Si ions, obtaining an anisotropic metallic nanocomposite. An average large birefringence of 0.06 was measured for these materials in the 300-800 nm region. Besides, their third order nonlinear optical response was measured using self-diffraction and P-scan techniques at 532 nm with 26 ps pulses. By adjusting the incident light’s polarization and the angular position of the nanocomposite, the measurements could be directly related to, at least, two of the three linear independent components of its third order susceptibility tensor, finding a large, but anisotropic, response of around 10⁻⁷ esu with respect to other isotropic metallic systems. For the nonlinear optical absorption, we were able to shift from saturable to reverse saturable absorption depending on probing the Au NP’s major or minor axes, respectively. This fact could be related to local field calculations and NP’s electronic properties. For the nonlinear optical refraction, we passed from self-focusing to self-defocusing, when changing from Ag to Au.

A large optical birefringence of oriented Ag nanoellipsoids embedded in silica was measured using an ellipsometric technique. The two main surface plasmon resonances associated with the axes of the ellipsoid were tuned, allowing us to quantify the light transmission through the samples when placed and rotated between crossed and parallel polarizers. This birefringence can be physically associated with the selective optical absorption of one component of the linear polarization of the incident light with respect to the anisotropic axis of the sample, depending on the wavelength used to perform the measurement.

We report a study of the Kerr effect and nonlinear optical absorption in a high-purity silica sample containing Cu nanoparticles prepared by ion implantation. With a vectorial self-diffraction experiment, we measured the tensorial components of the third-order nonlinear optical susceptibility response at 532 nm with pulses of 7 ns and 26 ps. We identified thermal effect as the main mechanism responsible for the nonlinear refraction in the nanosecond regime and electronic polarization for the picosecond regime. We observed saturable optical absorption in both regimes studied. We also measured the ablation threshold for this material, finding that the contribution of the linear optical absorption to the ablation threshold in each case can be different due to the presence of hot electrons.

In this work, we present a study of the nonlinear absorption properties from different gold nanorod (NR) systems in aqueous suspension. The NRs were obtained with the bottom-up protocol by the seed-mediated growth method (SMG), using Ag⁺ ions at different concentrations, and CTAB as surfactant. By using this method, aspect ratios between 2 and 5 were obtained. The transverse surface plasmons (TSP) are located between 514 – 535 nm, while the longitudinal surface plasmons (LSP) are between 639 – 921 nm, for the different samples studied. The Z-scan technique was implemented for open (OA) and closed (CA) aperture at 532 and 1064 nm, with laser pulses of 26 ps, for vertical and horizontal polarizations, with respect to the incidence plane (horizontal). At 532 nm all samples showed saturable absorption (SA), while for samples with LSP near 1064 nm, such effect was observed only at low-energy pulse experimental conditions. In the high-energy pulse regime, an apparent reverse-saturable absorption (RSA) was observed for both wavelengths. However for 532 nm, it was possible to determine that this effect results from structural changes in the samples, which are manifested through the behavior of nonlinear absorption and refraction curves. These results were used to determine the irradiances to which NRs can be modified by photodegradation.