Extraordinary Five-Wave Mixing in a Zinc Oxide Microwire on a Au Film

Coherentmultiwave mixing is in demand for optical frequencyconversion,imaging, quantum information science, etc., but has rarely been demonstratedin solid-state systems. Here, we observed three- and five-wave mixing(5WM) in a c-axis growth zinc oxide microwire ona Au film with picosecond pulses in the near-infrared region. An output5WM of 4.7 x 10(-7) & mu;W, only 2-3orders smaller than the three-wave mixing, is achieved when the excitationpower is as low as 1.5 mW and the peak power density as weak as & SIM;10(7) W/cm(2). The excitation power dependence of 5WMagrees well with the perturbation limit under the low intensity butexhibits a strong deviation at a high pumping power. This extraordinarybehavior is attributed to the cooperative resonant enhancement effectwhen pumping in the near-infrared range. Our study offers a potentialsolid-state platform for on-chip multiwave mixing and quantum nonlinearoptics, such as generating many-photon entangled states or the constructionof photon-photon quantum logic gates.