Hydrogenic impurity, external electric and magnetic fields effects on the nonlinear optical properties of a multi-layer spherical quantum dot

•Hydrogenic impurity effects on the nonlinear optical properties of a MLSQD are investigated.•Electric and magnetic fields effects are also studied.•Hydrogenic impurity considerably changes the ORC, SHG and THG.•External Fields have a great influence on the position and magnitude of the resonant peaks.

In this work, effects of an on-center hydrogenic impurity, external electric and magnetic fields on the optical rectification coefficient (ORC), second and third harmonic generations (SHG and THG) of a multi-layer spherical quantum dot (MLSQD) are studied. Energy eigenvalues and eigenvectors are calculated using the direct matrix diagonalization method and optical properties are obtained using the compact density matrix approach. Our results reveal that the hydrogenic impurity and external fields have a great influence on these optical quantities. Hydrogenic impurity reduces the magnitude of the resonant peaks and shifts them to the higher energies. An increase in the magnetic (electric) field, leads to increase (decrease) the interval energies and the dipole moment matrix elements. Therefore, resonant peaks of these optical quantities find an obvious blue (red) shift and their magnitudes enhance (diminish) with increasing the external magnetic (electric) field.