Studies on L-citrulline doped potassium dihydrogen phosphate- A non linear crystal with significant nonlinear properties

Potassium Dihydrogen Phosphate (KDP) single crystal is considered as one of the best representative of nonlinear optical crystals. Recently, amino acids having excellent nonlinear optical characteristics are being investigated as prospective dopants to improve the non linear optical characteristics of KDP. The present work is an attempt in this direction and L citrulline, one of the non essential amino acids showing good non linear optical characteristics is used as the dopant for KDP. Good quality crystals of L-citrulline doped KDP crystals were grown by slow evaporation technique. From the powder X-ray diffraction studies of doped KDP crystal, the structure of the doped crystals was determined by direct method and refined by Pawley method employing Topaz version program using the single crystal X-ray data for pure KDP. The lattice parameters for L citrulline doped KDP are a=7.467A0, b=7.467 A0, c=6.977 A0. The crystal falls into the tetragonal crystal system with space group I42 d. The presence of carbon and oxygen, which are primary components of amino acids, in the EDAX spectrum confirms the effectiveness of doping. The absorption spectra of the doped samples show that the crystals are transparent in the entire visible region. The second harmonic generation efficiency of the doped samples was determined by Kurtz powder technique using the Q-switched Nd:YAG laser beam and is found to be 2.2 times that of KDP. The nonlinear optical properties can be well studied by the open aperture Z scan technique. The open aperture curve exhibits a normalized transmittance valley. The nonlinear absorption coefficient β is obtained by theoretical fitting for two photon absorption. It is inferred that doping KDP with L citrulline has enhanced the nonlinearity considerably. This obviously suggests the potentiality of the crystal as an optical power limiter and also for various optical device applications.