Boosting third-harmonic generation by a mirror-enhanced anapole resonator

Light Sci Appl. 2018 Jul 25:7:44. doi: 10.1038/s41377-018-0051-8. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

We demonstrate that a dielectric anapole resonator on a metallic mirror can enhance the third harmonic emission by two orders of magnitude compared to a typical anapole resonator on an insulator substrate. By employing a gold mirror under a silicon nanodisk, we introduce a novel characteristic of the anapole mode through the spatial overlap of resonantly excited Cartesian electric and toroidal dipole modes. This is a remarkable improvement on the early demonstrations of the anapole mode in which the electric and toroidal modes interfere off-resonantly. Therefore, our system produces a significant near-field enhancement, facilitating the nonlinear process. Moreover, the mirror surface boosts the nonlinear emission via the free-charge oscillations within the interface, equivalent to producing a mirror image of the nonlinear source and the pump beneath the interface. We found that these improvements result in an extremely high experimentally obtained efficiency of 0.01%.