Four-wave mixing in InAlGaAs quantum dots

Summary form only given. The nonlinear optical properties of semiconductor quantum dots are of interest, both fundamentally and for potential device applications. Large optical nonlinearities are predicted due to the three dimensional confinement but the small active volume of the dots and their large inhomogeneous broadening strongly reduce the interaction with the electromagnetic field. Until now, four-wave mixing (FWM) in III-V quantum dots has only been reported in optical amplifiers at room temperature, where the interaction length is increased by waveguiding in the quantum dot plane. We have carried out degenerate FWM experiments in a slab geometry on a sample containing 10 layers of MBE-grown In/sub 0.5/Al/sub 0.04/Ga/sub 0.46/As quantum dots (QDs) with 50-nm Al/sub 0.08/Ga/sub 0.92/As barriers. Ground state photoluminescence emission was measured.