Excited state assisted three-photon absorption based optical limiting in nanocrystalline Cu2Se and FeSe2

Transition metal selenides (FeSe2 and Cu2Se) are synthesized by the hydrothermal co-reduction method. XRD results revealed the crystalline nature of their single phase and the elemental compositions are obtained using EDS. TEM images of the as-prepared samples show the formation of nanorods of 10-20 nm diameter in case of iron selenide and nanoparticles of 10-35 nm diameter in case of copper selenide. The energy bandgap values are calculated using tauc plots obtained from UV-Visible absorption spectra. The open aperture Z-scan measurements carried out using 5 ns pulses at 532 nm revealed that the samples showed excellent optical limiting behavior owing to strong nonlinear absorption (NLA). Through numerical simulations, the mechanism of NLA is found to be effective three-photon absorption which has significant contribution from excited state absorption.