Diffraction of the second harmonic beam generated from multi-domain multiferroics

Abstract

The optical second-harmonic generation technique (SHG) can reveal broken inversion symmetries of ferroelectric materials and interface/surface states. In this work, we investigate the multi-domain states of multiferroic La-doped BiFeO3 based on the optical SHG technique. When the fundamental wave is incident on the domain boundary, we observe a clear splitting in the spatial distribution of the second harmonic wave. We discuss further details of the experimental results including the second-harmonic beam splitting based on the diffraction of second-harmonic waves generated and propagated from each ferroelectric domain.