Fabricating silver nanoplate/hybrid silica gel glasses and investigating their nonlinear optical absorption behavior

Silver nanoplate/hybrid silica gel glasses were prepared via the sol-gel technique. Analysis of ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy extinction spectra confirmed the successful incorporation of silver nanoplates into the hybrid silica gel glasses. The silver nanoplate/hybrid silica gel glass composites are completely noncrystalline because of their low doping level compared with that of the silica matrix. The nonlinear optical absorption behavior of the silver nanoplate/hybrid silica gel glass composites was studied via open-aperture Z-scan technique with 4 ns pulse durations at 532 nm and 1064 nm. The nonlinear optical properties of silver nanoplates are maintained after they were introduced into silica gel glasses. Furthermore, the silver nanoplate/hybrid silica gel glasses exhibit intensity-dependent transformation from saturable absorption (SA) to reverse saturable absorption (RSA). The SA behavior at low excitation intensity can be attributed to the bleaching of ground-state surface plasmon resonance absorption induced by the retarded electronic relaxation process in solid-state gel glasses. By contrast, the RSA at high incident influence may have resulted from excited-state absorption and two-photon absorption.