Abstract :
Nonlinear optical rectification and the second-harmonic generation (SHG) in semi-parabolic and semi-inverse squared quantum wells are theoretically investigated within the framework of the compact-density-matrix approach and iterative method. The wave functions and the energy levels are obtained by using the effective mass approximation. It is found that nonlinear optical rectification coefficients and the second-harmonic generation are strongly affected not only by the confinement frequency ω 0 , but also by the parameter β .