Material modifications due to nonlinear effects created by multiphoton absorption in single crystalline silicon

Abstract

Material modification inside its bulk via high powered lasers involves much more than just heat transfer and melting of materials. It entails with it complex nonlinear physical phenomena such as multiphoton absorption, self-phase modulation, and self-focussing, amongst many others. These phenomena occur only with ultrafast lasers at very high intensities. Realising subsurface or bulk modifications in semiconductors such as silicon, opens up new avenues in the fields of optoelectronics and optical computation with the potential of increasing current computational speeds by orders of magnitude. The technology of three dimensional volume modification in materials via ultrafast lasers and nonlinear physics, is however, still in its nascent stages. This work explores the possibility of realising bulk modification in silicon and other polymers, and as well as their integration with optoelectronic devices; thus paving way for the future of optical computation.