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Optics Letters

Ultrafast time-resolved quantum beats in the polarization state of coherent emission from quantum wells

Arthur L. Smirl, X. Chen, Osvaldo Buccafusca

Published Jul 15, 1998• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Dual-channel spectral interferometry is used to measure the ellipticity, the orientation of the polarization ellipse, and the sense of rotation of the four-wave-mixing signal from a GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum well. Each parameter is observed to oscillate dramatically at the heavy-hole-light-hole quantum beat frequency. During each beat period (in the strong quantum beat regime), the ellipticity oscillates twice between linear and almost-circular polarization, the orientation of the polarization ellipse rotates through a complete 180 degrees , and the sense of rotation changes from left- to right-circular polarization.

DOI
10.1364/ol.23.001120

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Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference•Jan 20, 2003•0 citations
Dual-channel spectral interferometry is used to measure the ellipticity, the orientation of the polarization ellipse, and the sense of rotation of the four-wave-mixing signal from a GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum well. Each parameter is observed to oscillate dramatically at the heavy-hole-light-hole quantum beat frequency. During each beat period (in the strong quantum beat regime), the ellipticity oscillates twice between linear and almost-circular polarization, the orientation of the polarization ellipse rotates through a complete 180 degrees , and the sense of rotation changes from left- to right-circular polarization.
Dual-channel spectral interferometry is used to measure the vectorial dynamics of the the four-wave-mixing signal from a GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum well when both heavy-and light-hole excitons are excited. The ellipticity, the orientation, and the sense of rotation of the polarization ellipse associated with this emission are observed to oscillate dramatically at the heavy-hole-light-hole quantum beat frequency. The qualitative nature of the beating can be described by a simple model based on the density matrix equations for two independent three-level systems without the inclusion of many body effects; however, these beats are superposed on a polarization that is dominated by many-body effects.
The complete polarization state of the degenerate four-wave mixing signal from a GaAs/AlxGa1-xAs multiple quantum well is determined by time resolution of all four of its Stokes parameters as a function of the relative angle between the two linear input polarizations. The degree of ellipticity and the orientation of the polarization ellipse are both observed to vary dramatically in time, and the temporal evolution is found to depend strongly on the orientation of the input polarizations. These time-resolved results are shown to be consistent with previous measurements of the time-integrated Stokes parameters and to provide new constraints for physical models. The results are shown to be qualitatively consistent with a phenomenological model requiring the inclusion of both many-body interactions and biexcitonic effects.
A dual-channel version of spectral interferometry is used to completely characterize the extremely weak ultrashort coherent four wave mixing (FWM) emission from multiple quantum wells (MQWs) by time resolving the polarization state, as well as the scalar amplitude and phase. The amplitudes and the phases of the x and y components of the coherent FWM emission are found to exhibit systematic (but distinct) variations with excitation fluence, time delay between the two incident pulses, detuning of the laser wavelength from the heavy hole (hh) exciton, and the orientation of the input polarizations. From these, a self consistent picture of the temporal dynamics of the amplitude, phase and polarization state is obtained that delineates the roles of many body effects, such as local field corrections, excitation-induced dephasing and biexcitons, in determining the excitonic dynamics.
We demonstrate the presence of strong exciton-exciton correlations in GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum wells by using the polarization selection rules for four-wave mixing and a test that was originally designed to distinguish between quantum beats and polarization interference. We show that, when the four-wave-mixing signal is produced by two pulses that have the same circular polarization, dynamic beating behavior is observed at the heavy-hole-light-hole frequency that provides evidence of Coulomb-induced correlations that go beyond those expected from the semiconductor Bloch equations in the Hartree-Fock approximation and beyond the local field corrections used in simple phenomenological models. Moreover, this behavior cannot be explained by invoking biexcitonic effects. We demonstrate that this dynamic excitonic coupling can be explained in terms of a competition between quantum-beat-like and polarization-interference-like behavior, and we show that such behavior can be used to place quantitative limits on the coupling strength. In addition, we use a simple phenomenological model to show that excitation-induced-dephasing can produce such correlations.
We report time-resolved degenerate four-wave-mixing experiments on a high-quality single GaAs quantum well. The signals for parallel and cross-polarized exciting pulses show pronounced quantum beats with different frequencies corresponding to the heavy/light-hole splitting and the biexciton binding energy, respectively. Comparison of the experimental data with solutions of the optical Bloch equations for a phenomenological model system shows that these features result from strong contributions of the biexcitonic state. The importance of biexcitons to the nonlinear coherent response of the two-dimension exciton is further confirmed by the frequency dependence of the time-integrated four-wave-mixing signal amplitudes measured for the two polarization geometries.
Summary form only given. Here, we use the polarization selection rules for four-wave mixing (FWM) and a test that was originally designed to distinguish between quantum beats and polarization interference to demonstrate the presence of strong exciton-exciton correlations in GaAs-AlGaAs multiple quantum wells. We show that when the four-wave-mixing signal is produced by two pulses having the same circular polarizations that quantum-beat-like behavior is observed. The latter observation is contrary to the predictions based on either the density matrix equations for two independent three-level systems (without many body effects) or the conventional semiconductor Bloch equations (SBE), both of which predict that polarization interference, but not quantum beats, should be observed. Consequently, these observations provide clear evidence for exciton-exciton correlations and evidence that those correlations go beyond those contained in the SBE. The procedure described here provides a simple effective test for such processes. Finally, we show that the quantum-beating-like behavior can be reproduced by including a density-dependent dephasing term (so-called excitation-induced dephasing, or EID) in the density matrix equations.