Abstract

Nonlinear optical properties of composites have drawn much attention recently due to anticipation that the desired optical properties may be manipulated by the parameters such as the volume fraction of the constituents and the size of the microstructures which consist of nonlinear material¹,². The small size of the microstructure may reduce the relaxation time, and increase the speed of the device fabricated from such materials. Dielectric and quantum confinement may also drastically enhance the effective optical nonlinearity. In order to properly address the problem, one has to obtain the effective dielectric function for the composite material for which methods are, fortunately, already available in the literature. We use the self-consistent field approximation³. One must also treat the local field correction, as a result of which the propagation of the field becomes more complicated. Some aspects of these problems have been addressed earlier in the literature, e.g., the local field effect in combination with the effective medium theory has been done for the water drop by Leung⁴. However, most of the earlier work in the literature is essentially in the framework of the mean-field approximation¹ which, as will be shown, is only valid in the small absorption limit.

© 1988 Optical Society of America