Broadband cascading of second-order nonlinearity in randomized nonlinear photonic crystal

We study both experimentally and theoretically optical parametric process in one-dimensional nonlinear photonic crystal with random variation to the sign of the second-order nonlinear coefficient. We demonstrate that the structure randomness enables broadband third-harmonic generation via cascading of two second-order nonlinear parametric wave interactions with the overall conversion efficiency higher than previously recorded in fully disordered media such as the as-grown strontium barium niobate crystal. Furthermore, thanks to the one-dimensional modulation of the second-order nonlinearity, the emitted broadband harmonics preserve well the spatial intensity profile of the incident fundamental light beam, a feature critical for applications of optical frequency conversion but unavailable in two-dimensional fully random media due to the beam divergence caused by the simultaneous emission of noncollinear harmonic.