Abstract
Optical glasses with large third-order refractive nonlinearities and small two-photon absorption are strong candidate materials for optical switching applications. By analyzing Raman scattering spectra along with intensity- induced polarization changes, Hellwarth et al. were able to estimate the relative electronic and nuclear contributions to the third-order nonlinearities of a number of glasses.1 In a glass device the unavoidable nuclear phenomena may limit the speed of response and induce thermal effects. However in usual glasses, previous experiments performed in the time domain with short pulses (~100 fs) failed to demonstrate such a contribution.2-3 It has been suggested that this could be due to a rapid dephasing of localized vibrations in the inhomogeneous and disordered structure of a glass, inducing a short nuclear response almost indistinguishable from the instantaneous electronic contribution. Very recently, using very short pulses (~35 fs) and exciting large and well defined stretching modes of original glasses, Kang et al. were able to evidence such a contribution.4 However, their approach is available only for some particular materials and requires unconventional laser sources.
© 1998 Optical Society of America
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