Optical Kerr nonlinearity and multi-photon absorption of DSTMS measured by Z-scan method

We investigate the optical Kerr nonlinearity and multi-photon absorption (MPA) properties of DSTMS excited by femtosecond pulses at a wavelengths of 1.43 {mu}m, which is optimal for terahertz generation via difference frequency mixing. The MPA and the optical Kerr coefficients of DSTMS at 1.43 {mu}m are strongly anisotropic indicating a dominating contribution from cascaded 2nd-order nonlinearity. These results suggest that the saturation of the THz generation efficiency is mainly related to the MPA process and to a spectral broadening caused by cascaded 2nd-order frequency mixing within DSTMS