Entangled-photon absorption in semiconductor nanostructures

Marc Aßmann, M. Bayer

Ferney J. Rodríguez, David Guzmán, Luis Eduardo Martínez Salazar +1 more

Haifeng Xu, Ning Liu

W. Pötz

It is shown theoretically that light absorption in semiconductor nanostructures can be manipulated by coherent microwave fields. In suitably designed double wells, amplitude and phase of a microwave field allow control of both light absorption and the dynamics, i.e., tunneling versus localization of electrons. Depending on the photon energy of the pump pulse, either enhancement or reduction of net absorption can be achieved.

Luis J. Salazar, David Guzmán, Ferney J. Rodríguez +1 more

The dependence of the excitonic two-photon absorption on the quantum correlations (entanglement) of exciting biphotons by a semiconductor quantum well is studied. We show that entangled photon absorption can display very unusual features depending on space-time-polarization biphoton parameters and absorber density of states for both bound exciton states as well as for unbound electron-hole pairs. We report on the connection between biphoton entanglement, as quantified by the Schmidt number, and absorption by a semiconductor quantum well. Comparison between frequency-anti-correlated, unentangled and frequency-correlated biphoton absorption is addressed. We found that exciton oscillator strengths are highly increased when photons arrive almost simultaneously in an entangled state. Two-photon-absorption becomes a highly sensitive probe of photon quantum correlations when narrow semiconductor quantum wells are used as two-photon absorbers.

Keiichi Edamatsu