Cylindrical vector beam-excited frequency-tunable second harmonic generation in a plasmonic octamer

Abstract

We report a method to tune the second harmonic generation (SHG) frequency of a metallic octamer by employing cylindrical vector beams as the excitation. Our method exploits the ability to spatially match the polarization state of excitations with the fundamental target plasmonic modes, enabling flexible control of the SHG resonant frequency. It is found that SHG of the octamer is enhanced over a broad band (400 nm) by changing the excitation from the linearly polarized Gaussian beam to radially and azimuthally polarized beams. More strikingly, when subjected to an azimuthally polarized beam, the SHG intensity of the octamer becomes 30 times stronger than that for the linearly polarized beam ..