Scaling of the nonlinear optical cross sections of GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum-well hetero n-i-p-i´s

Author

McCallum, D.S. ; Cartwright, A.N. ; Smirl, Arthur L. ; Tseng, W.F. ; Pellegrino, J.G. ; Comas, J.

Author_Institution

Lab. for Photonics & Quantum Electron., Iowa Univ., Iowa City, IA, USA

Volume

30

Issue

12

fYear

1994

fDate

12/1/1994 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2790

Lastpage

2797

Abstract

We study the dependence of the Stark shift optical nonlinearity of GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum-well hetero n-i-p-i´s on the number of quantum wells per intrinsic region in otherwise identical hetero n-i-p-i´s. We determine that σ_eh, the nonlinear absorption cross section, is proportional to the number of quantum wells per intrinsic region. A study of the fluence dependence of σ_eh shows that the saturation carrier density is inversely proportional to the number of wells per intrinsic region. We find that the turn-on time of the nonlinear absorption change in our samples is independent of the number of quantum wells per intrinsic region. All of these results are consistent with the absence of retrapping of photogenerated carriers

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; aluminium compounds; carrier density; gallium arsenide; nonlinear optics; optical saturable absorption; semiconductor quantum wells; GaAs-AlGaAs; Stark shift optical nonlinearity; fluence dependence; intrinsic region; multiple quantum-well hetero junctions; nonlinear absorption; nonlinear absorption cross section; nonlinear optical cross sections; photogenerated carriers; quantum wells; retrapping; saturation carrier density; Absorption; Integrated optics; Low voltage; Nonlinear optical devices; Nonlinear optics; Optical devices; Optical materials; Optical saturation; Photorefractive effect; Quantum well devices;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Quantum Electronics, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9197

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/3.362731

Filename

362731