Optical nonlinearity enhancement for an anisotropic semiconductor–insulator composite

We investigate the effect of geometric anisotropy on the optical nonlinearity enhancement for a periodic composite with a rectangular array of elliptic semiconducting cylinders in an insulating host. By using a series expression of the space-dependent electric field obtained by a simple Fourier method in a periodic composite, we calculate the frequency dependence of the effective third-order nonlinear susceptibility as a function of anisotropy. The results show that the height of the nonlinearity enhancement peak may be increased by several orders of magnitude as the aspect ratio of the ellises is decreased or the lattice edge length ratio is increased. At resonance frequency, there exists a strong anomalous dispersion. We also investigate the effect of the volume fraction of the semiconductor phase for composites with a square array of circular semiconducting cylinders. Received: 23 November 2000 / Accepted: 2 August 2001 / Published online: 17 October 2001