Chirality-controlled second-order nonlinear frequency conversion in lithium niobate film metasurfaces

The high-quality factor resonant metasurfaces have extensive applications in enhancing nonlinear frequency conversion efficiency at the subwavelength scale. However, methods for actively modulating the frequency conversion process are limited. We design a chiral lithium niobate film metasurface and investigate the photonic spin as a new degree of freedom to dynamically control the second-order nonlinear frequency conversion, without reconfiguring the structure by using external stimuli. The chiral resonance with circular dichroism (CD) of 0.62 gives rise to a high nonlinear CD of 0.84 in second-harmonic generation efficiency. Interestingly, combining the chiral resonance and an achiral quasi-bound state in the continuum enables us to investigate the photonic-spin-controlled sum-frequency generation and the photon pair generation from the spontaneous parametric downconversion process. Owing to the ultrahigh quality factor exceeding 10³ both for two resonances, the second-order nonlinear frequency conversion occurs at a wavelength region of 0.2 nm, suggesting good monochromaticity. Our work opens new, to our knowledge, avenues for practical implementation of dynamically controlled nonlinear optical devices and will find utility in holography, switchable light sources, and information processing.