Optical limiting with off-resonant excitations in Ag nanocomposite glasses: A z-scan study

We have prepared silver containing metal nano-composite glasses through the ion-exchange technique, and annealed them at different temperatures to obtain Ag clusters of different sizes, which are estimated from low frequency Raman studies. Non-linear transmission experiments are done for off-resonant excitations at 800 nm, using 100 fs laser pulses. Non-linearity is observed at sufficient high intensities, which is attributed to local field effects within the particle. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.