Investigation of poling timescales and dopant duty cycle in doped silica multilayered thin films

Abstract

We investigate, for the first time to our knowledge, the impact of poling duration and duty cycle on second order non-linearities induced in poled silica multi-layer structures. We observe that the magnitude of the induced non-linearity, as determined through second harmonic generation, is strongly dependent on the duty cycle of the doped-undoped region in the layers with the highest non-linearity being observed with thick undoped layers. We also observe that multi-layer structures pole in a fraction of the time required for bulk samples. We utilize a charge migration model to explain these phenomena.