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Physical Review Letters

Self-Pulse-Shaping Coherent Control of Excitons in a Semiconductor Microcavity

D. S. Citrin

Published Nov 25, 1996• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The coherent control of the exciton population in quantum wells (QW's) is considered. For cavity-free QW's a $0\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulse leaves the QW empty of excitons subsequent to its passage. For the microcavity, in addition to certain $0\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulses, specially tailored pulses with nonzero area are also optimal. The coherent depopulation is a strong-coupling effect and is due to the $\ensuremath{\pi}$ phase shift in the self-consistent Maxwell field (i.e., including the local-field effect associated with the exciton resonance) in the cavity that occurs in the course of a vacuum-field Rabi flop.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.77.4596

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The coherent control of the exciton population in quantum wells (QW's) is considered. For cavity-free QW's a 0\ensuremathπ0\ensuremath{\pi}0\ensuremathπ pulse leaves the QW empty of excitons subsequent to its passage. For the microcavity, in addition to certain 0\ensuremathπ0\ensuremath{\pi}0\ensuremathπ pulses, specially tailored pulses with nonzero area are also optimal. The coherent depopulation is a strong-coupling effect and is due to the \ensuremathπ\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremathπ phase shift in the self-consistent Maxwell field (i.e., including the local-field effect associated with the exciton resonance) in the cavity that occurs in the course of a vacuum-field Rabi flop.
Summary form only given. The optical coherent control of quantum mechanical systems enables the direct manipulation of quantum states, and has been demonstrated on excitonic transitions in semiconductors. We have demonstrated the coherent control of the nonlinear optical response of quantum-well excitons in a resonant high-Q microcavity. There are two significant advantages to using excitons in microcavities instead of bare quantum wells: first, the multiple reflections which occur in the cavity strongly enhance the optical nonlinearity, enabling large-signal coherent control, and second, 2-color coherent control may be implemented, where a pump pulse tuned to one of the normal modes of the coupled exciton-microcavity system can control the response of a probe tuned to the other normal mode. The nonlinear response of the normal modes is due to the nonlinearity of the underlying exciton transition.
The normal modes in a nonperturbatively coupled quantum-well semiconductor microcavity are linear superpositions of the QW exciton and cavity mode when the QW exciton transition is resonant with the cavity mode. When the lower normal mode is excited by a phase-locked pair of optical pulses, the nonlinear response of a probe pulse tuned to the upper mode is controlled. Thus the normal modes are coupled in their nonlinear optical response due to the nonlinearity of the exciton underlying the two normal modes. The cavity enhancement of the excitonic nonlinearity gives rise to a large signal; modulating the relative phase of the excitation pulses produces a differential reflectivity of up to 10%. Besides the coherent control of normal modes which is explainable with in the frame of semiclassical models, we observe a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon in our system. The quantum correlations between the field and carrier density lead to intraband coherences which live much longer than the interband dephasing time.
We have carried out an extensive series of experiments on coherent control of semiconductor quantum microcavities. In these experiments, a phase-locked femtosecond optical pulse pair is used to excite the lower normal mode (cavity polariton), thereby controlling the reflection of a signal pulse tuned to the upper normal mode. Such a controlled reflection may be used as an all-optical switch with picosecond switching time. We have demonstrated that the effect of the microcavity is to provide a huge enhancement of the coherently controlled response compared to bare quantum wells. We have investigated in detail the microscopic physical processes responsible for the nonlinear optical response; the measured response fits well with theories based on the electron-hole Hamiltonian in the coherent-X(5) and 2nd-Born approximations. The physical limits to the coherent control are determined by excitation-induced dephasing; this limits the applicability of the switch in practical terms. We have discovered that the use of phase-locked excitation pulses is that one can generate novel intraband coherences in the quantum wells, arising from true quantum correlations between the cavity field and the carrier populations. The discovery of this effect was perhaps the first genuinely quantum optical effect observed in semiconductor microcavities.
Semiconductor quantum microcavities are interesting physical systems in which fundamental interactions between light and excitons can be explored. For example, in the weak - coupling limit, modified excitonic spontaneous emission can be observed. In the strong-coupling limit, the cavity field modes and the quantum well exciton modes become coupled; the normal modes of the system are "cavity-polaritons" [1,2]. For in-plane wavevectors k// near zero, the normal modes are split by the dipole coupling between the excitons and the cavity vacuum field. This splitting is often referred to as a vacuum-Rabi splitting (VRS), as it has the same physical origin as the VRS observed in the interactions of atoms with single-mode cavities. The physical system in this work consists of a λ planar microcavity formed by two distributed-Bragg reflectors, with five GaAs quantum wells situated in the center of the cavity. In all the experiments described here, the exciton and cavity modes are on resonance (the low-field VRS is 6 meV for this sample).