Efficient ultrafast all-optical modulation in a nonlinear crystalline gallium phosphide nanodisk at the anapole excitation
Gustavo Grinblat, Haizhong Zhang, Michael P. Nielsen, Leonid A. Krivitsky, Rodrigo Berté, Yi Li, Benjamin Tilmann, Emiliano Cortés, Rupert F. Oulton, Arseniy I. Kuznetsov, Stefan A. Maier
Abstract
High-refractive index nanostructured dielectrics have the ability to locally enhance electromagnetic fields with low losses while presenting high third-order nonlinearities. In this work, we exploit these characteristics to achieve efficient ultrafast all-optical modulation in a crystalline gallium phosphide (GaP) nanoantenna through the optical Kerr effect (OKE) and two-photon absorption (TPA) in the visible/near-infrared range. We show that an individual GaP nanodisk can yield differential reflectivity modulations of up to ~40%, with characteristic modulation times between 14 and 66 fs, when probed at the anapole excitation (AE). Numerical simulations reveal that the AE represents a unique condition where both the OKE and TPA contribute with the same modulation sign, maximizing the response. These findings highly outperform previous reports on sub-100-fs all-optical switching from resonant nanoscale dielectrics, which have demonstrated modulation depths no larger than 0.5%, placing GaP nanoantennas as a promising choice for ultrafast all-optical modulation at the nanometer scale.