Optical nonlinearity of liquid nanosuspensions: Kerr versus exponential model

Abstract

We report our experimental and theoretical progress towards elucidating the nonlinear optical response of nanosuspensions. To date, we have devised a fiber-optic variant of the Z-scan method to accurately measure the nonlinearity of liquid nanosuspensions. Furthermore, we shall show that the optical nonlinearity may be properly accounted theoretically by including both the virial coefficients for the soft-condensed matter system in addition to the exponential term, which does not account for particleparticle interactions, yielding an effective or renormalized Kerr effect in many cases. Show more