Surface-mediated enhancement of optical phase conjugation in metal colloids

Abstract

We show that the optical phase-conjugated reflectivity from silver and gold colloids is enhanced by several orders of magnitude. The reflectivity on resonance is comparable with that of CS₂ for metal-particle volume concentration of a few parts in 10⁶. We trace this enhancement to the nonlinearities of the electrons in the metal particles and extract the value of their optical Kerr-effect coefficient.