Soliton-induced nonlocal resonances observed through high-intensity tunable spectrally compressed second-harmonic peaks

Experimental data of femtosecond thick-crystal second-harmonic generation show that when tuning away from phase matching, a dominating narrow spectral peak appears in the second harmonic that can be tuned over hundreds of nanometers by changing the phase-mismatch parameter. Traditional theory explains this as phase matching between a sideband in the broadband pump to its second harmonic. However, our experiment is conducted under high input intensities and instead shows excellent quantitative agreement with a nonlocal theory describing cascaded quadratic nonlinearities. This theory explains the detuned peak as a nonlocal resonance that arises due to phase matching between the pump and a detuned second-harmonic frequency, but where in contrast to the traditional theory the pump is assumed dispersion free. As a soliton is inherently dispersion free, the agreement between our experiment and the nonlocal theory indirectly proves that we have observed a soliton-induced nonlocal resonance. The soliton exists in the self-defocusing regime of the cascaded nonlinear interaction and in the normal dispersion regime of the crystal, and needs high input intensities to become excited.