Structural, growth and optical characterizations of an organic third-order nonlinear crystal: Guanidinium trichloroacetate

Guanidinium trichloroacetate (GTCA), a novel organic single crystal was grown by a slow evaporation technique. The single crystal X-ray diffraction study revealed that the GTCA crystal belongs to tetragonal crystal system with the space group P4(1). From the linear optical studies, the lower cut-off wavelength of grown crystal was found at 257 nm. The luminescent study showed that the GTCA crystal has high degree of luminescence. The single shot laser damage threshold of grown crystal is found to be 2.6 GW/cm(2). The nonlinear refractive index, absorption coefficient and third-order susceptibility were estimated by Z-scan technique. The two independent tensor coefficients epsilon(11), epsilon(22) of the dielectric permittivity were calculated.