Abstract
We report on what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first observation of critical enhancement of optical nonlinearity in the vicinity of a phase transition. We studied the degenerate cubic optical nonlinearity of metallic indium on melting. We found that in the vicinity of the melting point this nonlinearity changes dramatically with temperature. So far nonlinear optical properties of liquid metals, where mercury is an example [1], have been studied only by second harmonic generation technique. No data on cubic nonlinearity of liquid metals or metals undergoing the phase transition are available. Recent observation of strong and very fast spin-flipping nonlinearity in bulk gold [2] stimulated us to investigate this nonlinearity in a liquid metal.
© 1996 Optical Society of America
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