Third-order nonlinear optical investigations of meso-tetrakis(2,3,5,6-tetrafluoro-N,N-dimethyl-4-anilinyl)porphyrin and its metal complexes

•We examined the third order NLO properties of a series of metallo porphyrins.•Techniques used were Z-scan and degenerate four wave mixing.•The χ(3) values are increasing with the d-shell occupancy of central metal atoms.•Electrostatic potential (ESP) mapping is done to know electron density changes.•The results obtained are in accordance with the ESP plots.

We report here the experimental investigation on third-order nonlinear optical parameters of 5,10,15,20-tetrakis(2,3,5,6-tetrafluoro-N,N-dimethyl-4-anilinyl)porphyrin and its various metal complexes, using Z-scan technique at 532 nm. The third-order nonlinear optical susceptibilities (χ(3)) were of the order 10−12 esu and are compared through degenerate four wave mixing (DFWM). The operating mechanism is reverse saturable absorption (RSA) as the effective excited-state absorption cross-section was found higher than ground state absorption cross-section as well as the magnitude of nonlinear absorption coefficient was found decreasing with on-axis input intensity. The compounds found to exhibit good optical limiting at 532 nm, 7 ns excitation steering applications in laser safety.

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