Second-harmonic generation by diamond color centers

Centrosymmetric crystalline solids, such as diamond, have been developed as fundamental photonic platforms like waveguide [1] , and light sources [2] , based on nonlinear optical (NLO) effects. Owing to the inversion symmetry of cubic crystal lattice, however, the NLO effects in the diamond are limited to the third-order. Thus, studies on more powerful and useful second-order NLO effects, such as second harmonic generation (SHG) in diamond is still challenging. In this presentation, we report on the first generation of SHG output from a bulk diamond crystal with the help of color center—nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center.