Observation of Intense Second Harmonic Generation from MoS₂ Atomic Crystals

Since de discovery of graphene, the family of 2-dimensional materials has attracted much recent attention. In this work, the nonlinear optical properties of few-layer MoS2 two-dimensional crystals are studied using femtosecond laser pulses. We observed highly efficient second harmonic generation from the odd-layer crystals, which shows a polarization intensity dependence that directly reveals the underlying symmetry and orientation of the crystal. Additionally, the measured second-order susceptibility spectra provide information about the electronic structure of the material. Our results open up new opportunities for studying the non-linear optical properties in these novel 2D crystals.