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Electric field detection has been widely utilized in many fields such as scientific research and integrated circuits. To enhance the tuning sensitivity of E-field sensor, in this paper, we theoretically proposed a highly sensitive E-field sensor composed of etchless lithium niobate (LN) material and hybrid coupling-grating systems in the visible near-infrared regime. Such configuration supports high-quality factor quasi-BIC resonance, which generates strong localized field confinement. Due to the large electro-optic coefficient of LN material, one can shift the wavelength and reflection ratio of resonance by tuning the refractive index of LN material. An analytical theory is carried out to explain the relationship between the refractive index variations and the applied voltages, so we successfully obtained a tuning sensitivity of 40.8 nm/V and a minimum detectable electric field amplitude of 24.5 mV with wavelength resolution of 1 nm. Due to the low parasitic capacitance of LN material and high conductivity of gold film and ITO layer which are utilized as the electrodes, the 3dB bandwidth of the devices should exceed 154 GHz. And we believe that such a surface-normal E-field sensor has extensive potential for the extremely weak electric field detection., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

Bound states in the continuum (BICs), a concept from quantum mechanics, are ubiquitous physical phenomena where waves will be completely locked inside physical systems without energy leaky. Such a physical phenomenon in optics will provide a platform for optical mode confinement to strengthen local field enhancement in nonlinear optics. Here we utilize an optical system consisting of asymmetric nanogratings and waveguide of thin film lithium niobate (LiNbO3) material to enhance second harmonic response near BICs. By breaking the symmetry of grating periodicity, we realize strong local field confined inside waveguide up to 25 times normalized to incident field (with dissymmetric factor of 0.2), allowing strong light-matter interaction in nonlinear material. From the numerical simulation, we theoretically demonstrate that such an optical system can greatly enhance second harmonic intensity enhancement of about 104 compared with undersigned LiNbO3 film and conversion efficiency reaching 1.53e-5 for dissymmetric factor=0.2 under illumination of 1.33 GW/(suqare cm). Surprisingly, we can predict that a giant enhancement of second harmonic conversion efficiency will exceed 8.13e-5 for dissymmetric factor=0.1 when the optical system is extremely close to BICs. We believe that such an optical system to trap local field inside is also accessible to promote the application of thin film lithium niobate in the field of integrated nonlinear optics.

Second harmonic generation (SHG) with a material of large transparency is an attractive way of generating coherent light sources at exotic wavelength range such as VUV, UV and visible light. It is of critical importance to improve nonlinear conversion efficiency in order to find practical applications in quantum light source and high resolution nonlinear microscopy, etc. Here an enhanced SHG with conversion efficiency up to the order of 0.01% at SH wavelength of 282 nm under 11 GW/cm2 pump power via the excitation of anapole in lithium niobite (LiNbO3, or LN) nanodisk through the dominating d33 nonlinear coefficient is investigated. The anapole has advantages of strongly suppressing far-field scattering and well-confined internal field which helps to boost the nonlinear conversion. Anapoles in LN nanodisk is facilitated by high index contrast between LN and substrate with properties of near-zero-index via hyperbolic metamaterial structure design. By tailoring the multi-layers structure of hyperbolic metamaterials, the anapole excitation wavelength can be tuned at different wavelengths. It indicates that an enhanced SHG can be achieved at a wide range of pump light wavelengths via different design of the epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) hyperbolic metamaterials substrates. The proposed nanostructure in this work might hold significances for the enhanced light-matter interactions at the nanoscale such as integrated optics.