Nonlinear optical
effects play key roles to communication, sensing,
imaging, and so on. Recently, nonlinear scattering (saturation and
reverse saturation) was discovered in gold nanospheres, providing
a novel approach to nonbleaching super-resolution microscopy. However,
the nonlinearity was previously limited to green-orange plasmonic
band. It is highly desirable to extend the applicable wavelength range.
In this work, we demonstrated nonlinear scattering in near-infrared
with gold nanorods and in blue-violet with silver nanospheres. Besides,
the nonlinear mechanism is clarified via different material/geometry.
By spectrally decoupling the contributions of plasmonic absorption/scattering
and interband/intraband transitions, we have verified plasmonic absorption,
and the subsequent thermal effects to be the dominating source of
nonlinearity. Our work not only provides the physical mechanism of
the nonlinear scattering, but also paves the way toward multicolor
super-resolution imaging based on plasmonic scattering.
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