Experiments on second- and third-harmonic generation from magnetic metamaterials.

Photonic metamaterials could provide optical nonlinearities far exceeding those of natural substances due to the combined action of (magnetic) resonances and local-field enhancements. Here, we present our experiments on second- and third-harmonic generation from magnetic metamaterials composed of nanoscale gold split-ring resonators and from control samples for excitation with 170-fs pulses centered at 1.5-microm wavelength. The strongest nonlinear signals are found for resonances with magnetic-dipole character.