Sol-gel synthesis and nonlinear optical transmission in Zn(1-x)Mg(x)O (x≤0.2) thin films

Nanocrystalline Zn1-xMgxO thin films with an average particle diameter of 60 nm have been deposited on glass substrates using a sol-gel spin-coating technique. Within the range of compositions, 0 <= x <= 0.20, the optical band gap could be tuned between 3.40 and 3.83 eV. The nonlinear optical transmission in the visible spectral region is investigated using ultrafast (100 fs) and short (7 ns) laser pulses at off-resonant wavelengths. The observed nonlinearity is strong and is comparable to that recently obtained in ZnO nanocomposite layers ion-implanted with Cu+ ions. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.