Theory of plasmonic effects in nonlinear optics: The case of graphene

We develop a microscopic large-N theory of electron-electron interaction corrections to multilegged Feynman diagrams describing second- and third-order non-linear-response functions. Our theory, which reduces to the well-known random-phase approximation in the linear-response limit, is completely general and is useful to understand all second- and third-order nonlinear effects, including harmonic generation, wave mixing, and photon drag. We apply our theoretical framework to the case of graphene, by carrying out microscopic calculations of the second- and third-order non-linear-response functions of an interacting two-dimensional (2D) gas of massless Dirac fermions. We compare our results with recent measurements, where all-optical launching of graphene plasmons has been achieved by virtue of the finiteness of the quasihomogeneous second-order nonlinear response of this inversion-symmetric 2D material.