Optical second‐harmonic reflection from polycrystalline silicon and its relation to grain boundaries

Grain boundary contributions to optical second‐harmonic generation give rise to an unusually high reflected second‐harmonic intensity from polycrystalline silicon. At the grain boundaries, the dangling bonds affect the second order nonlinear susceptibility via the electric dipole contribution. The second‐harmonic signal dependence on dangling bonds passivation by hydrogen is experimentally observed to support the grain boundary model.