Moderate fabrication and characterization of the microcrystalline SrCuO glass films with effective nonlinearities.

Since nonlinear optical materials used in the ultrafast all-optical switching is an important part for the modern optical technology, cuprates have been widely investigated for their specific Cu-O chain structure and intriguing optical properties. We present a new preparation method of microcrystalline SrCuO glass films on glass substrates combining spin-coating and co-sintering techniques. Then, the as-prepared samples were polished for different times to obtain microcrystalline SrCuO glass films with varying thickness. The influence of polishing time on the structure, the valence state and the nonlinear optical response were discussed, respectively. The purity of the SrCuO phase, surface morphology and the chemical composites of these synthesized glass films were given with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Importantly, optical absorption spectroscopy and Z-scan technique were used to measure linear absorption and third-order optical nonlinearity of the films. The experiments showed that third-order nonlinear susceptibility of the 140 min polished film sample with a thickness of 18 μm was up to 1.23 × 10 esu, indicating its potential application in the nonlinear field.