Coherent control of enhanced second-harmonic generation in a plasmonic nanocircuit using a transition metal dichalcogenide monolayer

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 15; no. 1; pp. 1855 - 7
• Main Authors: Wu, Pei-Yuan, Lee, Wei-Qing, Liu, Chang-Hua, Huang, Chen-Bin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 29.02.2024; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/624/400/1021; 639/925/927/1021; Chalcogenides; Coherence; Controllability; Extinction; Humanities and Social Sciences; Integration; Molybdenum compounds; Monolayers; multidisciplinary; Nonlinear optics; Optical communication; Optical frequency; Plasmonics; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Second harmonic generation; Signal generation; Signal processing; Transition metal compounds
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46209-8

Nonlinear nanophotonic circuits, renowned for their compact form and integration capabilities, hold potential for advancing high-capacity optical signal processing. However, limited practicality arises from low nonlinear conversion efficiency. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) could present a promising avenue to address this challenge, given their superior optical nonlinear characteristics and compatibility with diverse device platforms. Nevertheless, this potential remains largely unexplored, with current endeavors predominantly focusing on the demonstration of TMDs’ coherent nonlinear signals via free-space excitation and collection. In this work, we perform direct integration of TMDs onto a plasmonic nanocircuitry. By controlling the polarization angle of the input laser, we show selective routing of second-harmonic generation (SHG) signals from a MoSe 2 monolayer within the plasmonic circuit. Routing extinction ratios of 14.86 dB are achieved, demonstrating good coherence preservation in this hybrid nanocircuit. Additionally, our characterization indicates that the integration of TMDs leads to a 13.8-fold SHG enhancement, compared with the pristine nonlinear plasmonic nanocircuitry. These distinct features—efficient SHG generation, coupling, and controllable routing—suggest that our hybrid TMD-plasmonic nanocircuitry could find immediate applications including on-chip optical frequency conversion, selective routing, switching, logic operations, as well as quantum operations. Here, the authors integrate monolayer MoSe 2 with a plasmonic nanocircuit and demonstrate the coherent selective routing of the enhanced nonlinear optical signal emitted by the 2D semiconductor, with routing extinction ratios up to 14.86 dB.