Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2014
We report the Eu doping induced improvement on the second harmonic generation (SHG) of ZnO nanowires and correlates with the structural modification and corresponding linear absorption. A non-monotonic enhancement in the SHG emission is observed with the increase of Eu concentration. To understand the underlying mechanism, the effective second order non–linear coefficient (deff) is calculated from the theoretical fitting with considering the absorption effect. The highest deff (19.09±0.11 pm/V) is obtained for the 1 at.% Eu doped ZnO nanowires, which is several times larger than the standard SHG material β-BaB2O4 (BBO). Dependence of the deff with the Eu doping, structural modification and absorption magnitude are systematically discussed.