A remarkable enhancement between optical transparency and SHG efficiency on doped-KHP single crystals

Potassium hydrogen phthalate (KHP) single crystals are non-linear optical materials and their transmittance window are remarkably enhanced by an organic dopant such as resorcinol. The present study was mainly focused on the growth and characterization of the single-crystal KHP doped with resorcinol which was synthesized by a slow evaporation solution technique and its dimension was found to be $$8 \times 7 \times 2.75 \hbox { mm}³$$ at ambient temperature. Vibrational assignments of the functional groups confirmed the presence of dopants. The optical behaviour of the grown crystal was explored by ultraviolet–visible–near-infrared studies which result in 99% of the transmittance with the cut-off wavelength of 250 nm. The mechanical property was analysed by the Vickers microhardness test. The apparent microhardness increases with increasing applied indentation load revealing the reverse indentation size effect behaviour. Organic impurity increases the second harmonic generation efficiency of KHP, suggesting that the molecular alignment in the presence of resorcinol results in enhanced non-linearity.