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Applied Physics Letters

Fast recovery of excitonic absorption bleaching in tunneling biquantum well structures

Atsushi Tackeuchi, Shunichi Muto, Tsuguo Inata, Toshio Fujii

Published Apr 15, 1991• 29 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This letter demonstrates the fast recovery from excitonic absorption bleaching in tunneling biquantum well structures. A tunneling biquantum well consists of a series of narrow and wide wells. Recovery time was reduced to 1 ps using 1.7-nm-thick tunneling barriers, three orders of magnitude shorter than the few nanoseconds recovery due to radiative recombination. This is the fastest tunneling process observed to date.

DOI
10.1063/1.105106

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Applied Physics Letters•Sep 16, 1991•5 citations
This letter demonstrates the fast recovery from excitonic absorption bleaching in tunneling biquantum well structures. A tunneling biquantum well consists of a series of narrow and wide wells. Recovery time was reduced to 1 ps using 1.7-nm-thick tunneling barriers, three orders of magnitude shorter than the few nanoseconds recovery due to radiative recombination. This is the fastest tunneling process observed to date.
We report the time evolution of excitonic absorption bleaching in resonant tunneling bi-quantum-well (TBQ) structures, in which the ground electron level in a narrow well has the same energy as the second electron level in a wide well. In resonant TBQ structure, we observed a reduction in the absorption recovery time and an increase in the tail-to-peak ratio of the absorption change. By comparing the absorption change of resonant TBQ with the e2-hh2 excitonic absorption change of conventional multiple quantum wells (MQW), we show that the increase in the tail-to-peak ratio of a resonant TBQ can be attributed to the thermally remaining holes in the first excited subband of heavy holes.
The optical Stark effect of excitons in semiconductors, where the exciton resonance is blue shifted by an off-resonance light beam, has been actively studied. Here we report on the observation of a very fast recovery of the exciton bleaching for an off-resonance excitation condition in a quantum well sample at room temperature. The good agreement between the experimental results and our numerical calculations of the time-resolved absorption spectra suggests a coherent transient population buildup and decay occurring on the time scale of the pump pulse.
Recent studies of the transient behavior of absorption saturation in low temperature Multiple Quantum Wells (MQW) samples have revealed a surprisingly fast recovery of absorption (within 10 ps at 15 K) after excitation by intense ultrashort light pulses1. This has been attributed to the effect of the large stimulated recombination rate caused by amplified spontaneous luminescence guided along the MQW structure, as confirmed by streak camera observations of the edge-emitted luminescence1, and by measurements of time-resolved luminescence spectra with subpicosecond resolution2. This effect could be used to increase the speed of optical gates based on absorption saturation or carrier-induced nonlinear refraction, but a more complete understanding of the mechanisms involved is clearly needed in order to evaluate the interest of this approach.
Rapid superradiant decay of coherently excited excitons in thin quantum wells (QWs) on a time scale of approximately 10 ps has been theoretically predicted by several groups [1], however, the experimental observation of this ultrafast radiative recombination is still the subject of controversial discussions. A recent theoretical paper [2] concludes, that this radiative decay rate should be strongly enhanced in multiple QW (MQW) Bragg structures due to radiative coupling of excitons excited in different wells via the exchange of transverse photons.
The bleaching of the n=1 and n=2 heavy-hole exciton absorption has been observed at room temperature in ternary alloy Al0.37Ga0.63As/AlAs multiple-quantum-well structures by nanoseconds pump-and-probe spectroscopy. The relative variation of the absorption coefficient [(−Δα)/α0] are about 15% and 8%, respectively. The nonlinear absorption coefficient (α2) and the nonlinear absorption cross section has been deduced. The value of the saturation density deduced from our spectra is in good agreement with the theoretical predictions. The influence of the staggered band alignment on the observed process is also discussed.