Enhancement of second harmonic generation efficiency, laser damage threshold and optical properties of cobalt chloride doped with L-alanine single crystal

Abstract

In the present study, L-alanine crystal is grown with cobalt chloride as dopant by low temperature solution growth using slow evaporation technique at room temperature. The lattice parameters of the grown pure and cobalt chloride doped L-alanine crystals were determined by the single crystal X-ray diffraction technique. The presence of the elemental composition such as cobalt chloride present in the L-alanine lattice was confirmed by energy dispersive X-ray analysis. The optical transmittance, absorbance, reflectance was measured and used to study the optical properties of the pure and doped L-alanine crystal. The pure L-alanine crystal has high optical transmittance in the whole visible range and UV transparency with lower cutoff wavelength at 240[Formula: see text]nm. By adding cobalt chloride to L-alanine crystal, the transmittance decreases the value of cutoff shifts to the higher wavelengths. Nonlinear optical studies reveal that the SHG efficiency and laser damage threshold energy increases when the L-alanine crystal is doped with cobalt chloride. From microhardness studies, it is observed that the cobalt chloride doped L-alanine crystal is harder than the pure crystal.