Inhibition of the two-photon absorption response exhibited by a bilayer TiO2 film with embedded Au nanoparticles

We use two different synthesis approaches for the preparation of TiO2 films in order to study their resulting third order optical nonlinearity, and its modification by the inclusion of Au nanoparticles in one of the samples. An ultrasonic spray pyrolysis method was used for preparing a TiO2 film in which we found two-photon absorption as a dominant nonlinear effect for 532 nm and 26 ps pulses; and a purely electronic nonlinearity at 830 nm for 80 fs pulses. A strong optical Kerr effect and the inhibition of the nonlinear optical absorption in 532 nm can be obtained for the first sample if Au nanoparticles embedded in a second TiO2 film prepared by a sol-gel technique are added to it. We used an optical Kerr gate, z-scan, a multi-wave mixing experiment and an input-output transmittance experiment for measuring the optical nonlinearities. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America