Enhanced Five-Photon Photoluminescence in Subwavelength AlGaAs Resonators

Abstract

Multiphoton processes of absorption photoluminescence have enabled a wide range of applications including threedimensional microfabrication, data storage, and biological imaging. While the applications of two-photon and three-photon absorption and luminescence have matured considerably, higher-order photoluminescence processes remain more challenging to study due to their lower efficiency, particularly in subwavelength systems. Here, we report the observation of five-photon luminescence from a single subwavelength nanoantenna at room temperature enabled by the Mie resonances. We excite an AlGaAs resonator at around 3.6 mu m and observe photoluminescence at around 740 nm. We show that the interplay of the Mie multipolar modes at the subwavelength scale can enhance the efficiency of the five-photon luminescence by at least 4 orders of magnitude, being limited only by sensitivity of our detector. Our work paves the way toward applications of higher-order multiphoton processes at the subwavelength scales enabled by the physics of Mie resonances