Two-photon absorption in semiconductor-based photonic crystals

Summary form only given. Nonlinear optics in photonic crystals has attracted a lot of interest recently because of the wide variety of effects that have been predicted and their potential applications. One important class of effects involves nonresonant third-order nonlinearity, i.e., Kerr effect. Gap solitons and optical limiters are examples of phenomena resulting from such nonlinearity. So far however, the role of the imaginary part of /spl chi//sup (3)/ has been neglected, in part because many applications have been intended for dielectrics and waveguide-type applications where absorption is to be avoided. In this paper, we investigate theoretically and experimentally the role of two-photon absorption on the transmittance properties of silicon-based photonic crystals.