Abstract

A variety of optically nonlinear materials has been discovered and developed using organic films, polymers, metal or semiconductor dispersed glass and super lattice multilayers.¹⁾ For storage applications, a super resolution recording technique was proposed by using a nonlinear material to achieve sub-terabyte (TB) disk capacities on one optical disk.²⁾ A silver oxide super resolution structure, which is called a super resolution near filed structure (super-RENS), was proposed that combines optical near-field and super resolution mask techniques. In this paper, the optical nonlinearity of silver oxide super resolution structure is investigated using a pulsed diode laser. Interesting effects of the nonlinear properties are observed that are a function of the oxygen concentration during deposition. In these experiments, the change in transmission through the sample is determined by the linear absorption coefficient α and the nonlinear absorption coefficient β, where the change in irradiance ∆I through an incremental thickness ∆z is ∆I/∆z = - αI - βI².³⁾

© 2003 Optical Society of America